It doesn't really matter how many dogs you've trained semi-professionally. Until you get your hands on one genetically identical animal, after another, after another... I don't think you'll fully appreciate how much alike these creatures will be. Additionally, they'll be raised in very similar drug-sniffing environments.
It will be very much similar to driving one 2007 V6 Honda Accord just off the assembly line after another. You'll rarely notice a significant difference from one to the next.
There's a huge amount that we don't know about genes. It was just recently thought that 95% of our DNA was "junk" DNA because it did not have a function that scientists understood. Then it was found out that over 500 segments of this "Junk" DNA was ultraconserved among vertrebrate animals. This means that there must be some highly important reason why it was unchanged over 75 million years of evolution. Some scientists have also found a similarity of the patterns of the dna to human language , which is pretty interesting as well.
Not only that, but human twins are not perfectly identical, and show many minor variances in gene expression. The cloned drug sniffing dogs may well be practically identical, especially if they are raised in similar environments, but this will definitely be affected by the actual cloning techniques involved.
In any case, we will have to wait to find out what the results are before passing judgement. Whatever the results are, science will definitely be advanced through this project, which is a wonderful goal in itself.
One of the really interesting things about sites like Facebook is that people are putting all of their data into a massive interlinked network, which is both an advertiser's wet dream and the government's as well.
Your email, address, friends, music, books, other interests, and who you're dating are all available on Facebook for whoever wants that information, together with your political views, club associations, educational background, possibly even your job history.
Besides the information that you yourself put online, Facebook also contains information that it actively gains about you through other means -- just check their privacy policy:
Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience. So there is a profile of you in Facebook that you don't have access to, but also contains logs of chats that you have had from IM services that sold your chats to Facebook! Plus blog posts mentioning you and who knows what else -- that's pretty creepy.
The US government has let it be known that they want "Total Information Awareness" for a while, and sites like Facebook end up linking all kinds of intimate personal details of large groups of people, making it one of the ideal sources for gathering that information.
The CIA has also been very interested in student activities for decades. Most of today's leaders got started in political activities as students, and students are much less guarded about their self-expression, so it makes sense that universities would be perfect places to start gathering information for anyone planning to influence future political events.
So go ahead and post all your personal information online, but just be aware of people other than advertisers who might be looking at it and why.
The Bad Guys and their fellow travelers will still find something to bitch about. All those hajjis locked up at Club Gitmo? We would've been within our rights to just kill them all where we found them...the Geneva Conventions allow for the summary execution of unlawful combatants. Instead, we decided to try to play nice and let them live. A handful have even been cut loose, upon which they've spun lies about their treatment. Said lies then get their fellow travelers seething. How's that for gratitude? How does a troll get modded +3?
There is no definition of "unlawful combatants" in the Geneva Conventions. There is only the distinction between "lawful combatants" (the enemy you are fighting) and ordinary citizens - if you're not one, you're the other. Relevant laws apply to both situations.
I won't even respond to the rest -- it's all well documented, unless you're the kind that considers CNN to be the equivalent of "Al Jazeera".
Would you rather they just used lead bullets when rioters take to the streets? America is a very peaceful country -- we don't have "rioters taking the streets" every day, or every year, or even every decade. When was the last significant riot in America? . So "Rioters" is a straw-man argument. So why spend huge amounts of time, energy, money on a rare problem that actually costs less than the solution?
"Political Protesters" is the target of these non-lethal systems. As Americans get more and more unhappy with the direction the country is taking, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the two ruling parties are cooperating rather than competing, people will realize that voting is largely ineffectual.
The Democrats were elected to "bring home the troops". So what did they do? The Democrats provided Bush with all the funding for the Iraq war that he wanted, and have yet to substantially limit Bush's power. When the ballot box is proven useless as a means of creating change, you will have people exercising their rights of free speech, protesting loudly in large gatherings in American cities.
These will turn into massive political protests as Americans demand change. That will be the time when the non-lethal crowd control measures that this administration has been so energetically developing will be used -- against the people who will be protesting the administration.
'They want to be in contact with them at all times.' 24/7 contact has been perfected since around 1997 -- with cell phones and pagers everyone is pretty much always in contact now unless they specifically choose not to be. So that purpose can't have anything to with the need for "presence technologies" and is most likely a red herring to mislead people from the true purpose of the technology. The surveillance aspect is separate from just contacting employees, and seems to be where the focus really is.
A 16-year-old girl in Washington state, her mother, aunt, and friends, are going through a nightmare right now with a stalker recording conversations through the cell phone mic and viewing their actions through the cell phone camera even when the phone seemed to be off. Covering the camera lens with tape and taking out the battery from the phone seems to be the only defenses that work.
According to James M. Atkinson, a Massachusetts-based expert in counterintelligence who has advised the U.S. Congress on security issues, its not that hard to take remote control of a wireless phone. You do not have to have a strong technical background for someone to do this, he said Tuesday. They probably have a technically gifted kid who probably is in their neighborhood.
Once the technology is perfected, it won't be any harder to add to all the cell phones in the US than the remote listening capabilities were. Tools like this would reduce the amount of manpower it would need to track many thousands of people at once, and make recordings to privately threaten them with when necessary. Projects like the defunct "Total Information Awareness" demonstrate the desire of the government to know "everything" about it's citizens.
When we actually examine your reasoning, you use the exact same logical fallacy that every conspiracy theory makes use of, and the original post used several common logical fallacies, as well as many lies. All you've got going for yourself so far is anger, name-calling, accusations, and all-caps typing. You bring up the term "logical fallacy" without listing any, and accuse the post of lies, again without listing any.
You haven't examined anything. The parent post uses some high-sounding words and a few straw-man attacks, and then somehow gets modded +1 insightful.
The Enron conspiracy was true even before it was proven to be true in a court of law. You and your high-school buddy mods would have used the exact same accusations of "whackjob" against a post suggesting that Enron could be gaming the electricity market. Why? because there is no thinking in the accusations, just reflex.
Every time I think that the Slashdot crowd may have regained some of their critical thinking skills, some fool goes and posts a whackjob conspiracy theory and gets modded +5 informative. "Whackjob conspiracy theory", huh? So I guess Enron didn't really cause rolling blackouts in California just to drive up the price of electricity? The tapes exist to prove it.
I guess MCI/ Worldcom CEO Bernie Ebbers wasn't really convicted of conpsiracy to commit securities fraud in the $11 Billion Worldcom collapse. Again, there's plenty of proof.
Both of the above conspiracies have been proven in a court of law. The oil market is many times larger than the California electricity market, so there is plenty of motive there.
"Critical Thinking Skills" should include a better understanding of how the world works, not some pollyanna "no one would try to cheat me" attitude. That type of head-in-the-sand attitude helps no one.
What amazes me is that the parent post is the one that dredges up the whackjob conspiracy theories, and then somehow gets modded "insightful". The kind of anger and vitriol in the post is not helpful, either. This is not Digg -- if you disagree, at least put some reasoning into it, and not just name-calling
If you're at all interested in the forces at work behind the "car of the future" topic, you owe it to yourself to see the movie Who Killed the Electric Car?
The state of California mandated in the 1990's that 10% of the cars sold in California be emission-free, so GM and Toyota put out all-electric vehicles. The cars had a top range of 80-100 miles before recharging, but since most people only drive around 36 miles a day, that was a non-issue for many people.
Here are some of the issues the film discusses:
1) the people who leased the cars were absolutely in love with them and thought that they were very well-engineered 2) The people who leased the cars tried desperately to buy them, but were never allowed to. GM turned down $1.9 million for the 78 uncrushed EV-1's before they were finally crushed. 3) All of the electric cars were crushed, even the brand-new ones, after the companies who made them promised that wouldn't happen. 4) The drivers of the electric cars really loved the engineering and handling of the cars. 5) The federal government joined the car manufacturers in a suit against the state of California fighting the 10% zero-emissions law. 6) one person in the movie told about a congressman who told him to get the electric car killed before it spread to other states (or the congressman would "battle" him) 7) The electric cars were so simple to work on that major dealership revenue sources would have been lost. 8) Consumers were very interested in lowering emissions and helping the environment, and were also willing to pay to do it.
The top 3 oil companies in America pulled in well over $700 BILLION for the last two years, without even looking at the record profits for the previous years. The movie makes a serious case that there was a serious push against the electric car to preserve those future profits from harm and keep the electric car from being a mainstream idea / product.
Some might call this a conspiracy theory and there are market forces involved, but it also really just sounds like intelligent business practices by the oil companies. Given the tremendous needs in the marketplace now, and the advances in technology, it will really be very interesting to see how this market develops.
The public outrage led to an official Congressional investigation of the FBI which gave a report in 1976 that had this to say:
"Americans are now aware of the capability and proven willingness of their Government to collect intelligence about their lawful activities and associations. What some suspected and others feared has turned out to be largely true -- vigorous expression of unpopular views, association with dissenting groups, participation in peaceful protest activities, have provoked both government surveillance and retaliation." Sound Familiar?
The report goes on to say:
"Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone "bugs", surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous -- and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations -- have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity. Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed... Remember, these are not "conspiracy theorists" talking -- this is an actual government report from 30 years ago documenting the behavior of the previous 40 years.
To comment on your first link - If the protesters were throwing things at the police, then it can probably legitimately be called a riot. The police, by necessity, have a little more latitude during a riot it is their job to disperse the crowed to prevent damage The problem with this attitude is that the police frequently have paid agents known as Agents Provocateurs
It seems that police brutality is getting so common now that they are willing to beat members of the media on camera . (The clip begins with the narrator suggesting that the protestors were "asking for it" by throwing rocks at the police, but they can't spin the footage of their own camerapeople getting beaten up.)
Otherwise, the police tend to lie about the incidents , even going so far to claim in the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in Britain that 5 different cameras watching the action were all somehow not functioning .
Cameras are getting tinier and tinier all the time, and now we have Wi-Fi enabled storage cards. When cameras get so small the cops can't see them, and people can record the content wirelessly to hidden devices, it will be a lot harder for the bad cops to stop the filming of the brutality.
This liquid lens technology sounds like it might really help create tiny and cheap cameras that people can use to bring more justice to the world.
It seems that police brutality is getting so common now that they are willing to beat members of the media on camera . (The clip begins with the narrator suggesting that the protestors were "asking for it" by throwing rocks at the police, but they can't spin the footage of their own camerapeople getting beaten up.)
Otherwise, the police tend to lie about the incidents , even going so far to claim in the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in Britain that 5 different cameras watching the action were all somehow not functioning .
Stuff like this happens all the time, and it will be a great day when we can start getting more of it on tape. Then the police can keep policing the citizens, but the citizens can also police the police.
Democracy hasn't seemed to work all that well lately, at least in a two party system.
The two parties are working together to make sure no one else gets in and spoils their "party". For example, there is an excellent article describing how the presidential "debates" are controlled to prevent any other parties from gaining traction. They realized that Ross Perot got 90% of his support after the debates, so they created a system to prevent any other parties from being able to join by raising the bar high enough. The "Commission on Presidential Debates" which runs the debates, is totally run by the two parties. In the article, it quotes Walter Cronkite as calling the CPD an "unconscionable fraud".
The "debates" are also very carefully controlled (according to the article) of presenting the appearance of being a debate without actually being a debate, so as to pose no danger to the candidates, and so that important issues can be avoided.
Ron Paul, a current presidential candidate and member of the Republican party, said recently on the Daily Show that he is only a Republican because he couldn't get elected if he were a member of another party. He wrote an essay on how the two-party system disenfranchises voters.
Say something indiscreet in public? Mysteriously you'd lose your job and no matter how hard you tried you just couldn't get past an interview for even the most unskilled job.
That's already happening with the no-fly list. A Princeton professor who gave a televised speech criticizing Bush's constitutional overreach found himself on the no-fly list afterwards. A guy who wrote a book called "Bush's Brain" about Karl Rove found himself on the no-fly list afterwards. 20 Wisconsin peace activists suddenly found themselves on the no-fly list .
The no-fly list is even being used to harass opposition political party members. Senator Ted Kennedy suddenly found himself on the no-fly list and had a lot of trouble getting himself off the list. The head of the TSA had to call him personally and promise to take him off the list before his troubles ended. In the same article, it talks about employees of the ACLU also ending up on the list.
Giving the government more secret and anonymous "lists" to deny people rights is not an invitation to abuse, it's a guarantee of it. The fact that systems like this from previous fascist governments are being implemented in modern-day America is one reason that people are arguing that America is on a well-planned transition to fascism.
This type of thing is not limited to Russia -- it's very common in America, although a little more subtle.
For example, Rupert Murdoch told the NY POST Not to publish news critical of China Because he was trying to do business deals there.
In the runup to the Iraq war, all you could see on TV was retired generals, and MSNBC cancelled Phil Donahue's show during the month that it had the highest ratings on their network because he was
anti-war and had guests with ant-war viewpoints
.He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." The report went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."
The myth that America has a free press allows these types of things to go unchallenged, but the truth of the matter is that America has a "corporate press" that does what its conservative masters wants. The press used to be known as the "4th estate" because it was another tool that held the government in check and kept it accountable, but now it is just "info-tainment".
How bad has America's press become? Viewers of "Fake News" Comedy shows (The Daily Show and the Colbert Report) were found by one study to be more informed than viewers of other "real' news shows.
This decision was attacked by many Ugandans, who saw it as a threat to tourism and water resources.
This is interesting because it shows that the "locals" in Africa are becoming aware of the value of land for eco-tourism and the value of the fresh, clean water in the area.
Hopefully this discovery can help the citizens of Uganda fight back against cronyism and corporatism and help preserve nature.
If the land gets razed, it will only go to make more sugar and palm oil plantations, which would just go into making more Twinkies or other junk food. I am really glad there are people fighting to preserve the land and the monkeys!
This reminds me of the case (again, near Atlanta) of a vegan being arrested and sent to jail for writing down the license plate number of an unmarked cop car that Homeland Security sent to photograph the protester.
Don't be shocked as the tyrants find more ways to increase their power of tyranny. They are not here to help you, there are not here to protect you -- there are there to protect their own incomes and pensions, and you are powerless to stop...
To show the truth of this, and to point out the absurdity, anyone who is engaged in political protest is targeted in an effort to intimidate -- even the police themselves. When the police publicly protested the slow pace of their contract talks with the city, they too were videotaped, photographed, and harassed . They were very surprised, because they were police themselves.
If you look at that situation in terms of the system being mostly in maintaining itself, then it would be natural for the system to fear and harass anyone pushing for change, even the police themselves.
Hopefully the "new media" of blogs and other internet information will help become an effective counterweight to the immense power of the authoritarian elements of our government. Meanwhile, don't be too surprised at finding other examples of creeping authoritarianism in our country. A grandmother in Atlanta was shot and killed by plainclothes police when they invaded her home no-knock raid at night . She thought they were robbers trying to break in when she wounded three of them and was killed by return fire. All they found in her house was a small amount of marijuana. They tried to get an informant to lie and say that he told them that drugs were being sold there after the whole affair becam a public relations nightmare.
Tivo has to make some kind of partnership to survive -- it simply doesn't make sense otherwise.
I bought a used series 2 TIVO for $50, but they were charging $20 / mo. and I had to sign up for a year's contract to get any service.
Comcast only charges me $11.95 / mo. for their DVR and I can run it month to month so I can ditch it when something more mature and cheaper comes to the market. Tivo just seem like jerks compared to that, but it's because they are so desperate they have to act like a cell-phone company. Even if you give someone a gift certificate, it only counts *towards* them signing up for a 1-year contract.
I laughed when I saw Apple's iTV offering, but then I heard Disney had already sold over $1 Million worth of downloaded movies over iTunes. Then I started thinking about what could happen if I let go of the cable TV (at $60 / month) and just ordered the shows I want over iTunes -- the only show I care about is the Daily Show, and anything else I watch is really just a distraction from my life.
The good thing about this is that it shows that the market is moving to an iTunes distribution model, and that kind of competition will only help everyone. iTunes is the competition space here though, not Netflix
This is one of the most laughable things I have ever heard.
CD prices were always higher than the equivalent cassette tape, which was much more complicated to produce and had the same production and marketing costs.
FTA: For example, when you hear a song played on the radio -- that didn't just happen! Labels make investments in artists by paying for both the production and the promotion of the album, and promotion is very expensive.
The only thing that gets played on the radio is the latest Britney Spears bubblegum crap-ola. In fact, Mandy Moore recently apologized for making such bad music
So we have to pay for all the payola in getting the radio stations bribed to play the songs on the radio.
And then when a CD gets scratched, broken, or stolen, do we get a free replacement? Oh no, we have to pay the full retail cost all over again even though the RIAA wants us to think that we have somehow "licensed" the music from them.
I am glad that they are sweating, which they must be in order to be trying to play the "victim" game. The days of the Internet are here to stay, and bands can finally distribute their own music without getting shafted.
In the linked article it says that only 10% of all CD's make a profit. The other 90% of CD's put the bands into debt to the record companies, making it a really bad deal to sign a record contract. Courtney Love does the math.
The RIAA sounds desperate, and I hope they are -- it would serve them right.
The sheer ease of starting a business with Linux and other open-source technologies (MySQL, PHP, ruby, etc) gives Linux the the advantage over Unix. If the company grows, we will just keep using what works.
I am currently working in a 10-man startup company that delivers employment training over the Web. Our system runs off a cluster of 3 boxes in a LAMP configuration, and we never paid a dime for server software.
Linux dedicated hosting is much cheaper than Windows dedicated hosting, and there are so many tutorials and packages out there that make it really easy to learn and deploy open-source systems.
Sun and company have started their battle way too late for anything but niche deployments -- the King of "Big Iron", IBM, long ago threw in the mainframe towel in favor of Linux.
My Dad used to run a university library, and he was always very forward - looking in terms of IT. He wanted to get a Sun server to run thin-client systems for the library patrons to use rather than having to clean the Windows systems every day, and he could not get a Sun salesperson to talk to him (this was about 12 years ago).
The main library software ran on Sun servers (that they bought through the software vendor), and he was highly impressed with the stability of the Sun boxes. He was so impressed that when the time came for PC's to be installed in the library, he wanted to put 20 thin-client terminals in that ran sessions on a second Sun server. That plan ended because he could not get Sun to talk to him -- he literally could not get the sales people there to call him back to sell him the system.
The end result was that he had to install the 20 PC's and deal with the viruses, downloaded software and other daily headaches of the Windows world and Sun lost an easy sale because they were too arrogant to care.
Sun should have been fighting way back then -- Linux is way too mature now, and way too cheap and easy to deploy. In these days of Ubuntu livecd's and Macs running on top of Linux, anyone who is not a Windows person who is interested in computing will learn Linux. Sun may have a few legacy apps, it looks like they will just be a niche player at best. Sun was legendary for their stability, but our Linux boxes have all the stability we need.
I am sure Unix will have it's niches here and there, but Linux is way too strong at this point.
It seems that the arrogant jerks are the ones who want to be CEO, from my experience.
I work for a small startup that finally had a really profitable year, and made $600K profit in '05-'06 off of our main customer. There were only about 8 people in the company, so that was pretty good -- we had a lawyer, two programmers (including me) and some salespeople.
Sales were really good, and the company decided it needed some "leadership" - so a CEO was hired -- this guy was a retired CEO of a call center. (we were a web training startup, so this was a big WTF for me, but I had no say in it)
This CEO then basically decides to spend the whole year keeping everyone tied up in meetings. At the first all-company meeting (we were all telecommuting) a co-worker said "this looks really bad -- there are monre chiefs in this company than indians" -- out of 8 people, 5 were executives and 4 were regular workers.
Our product is web training based on PHP and Mysql, so he had the lead programmer (the co-founder) driving a 100 miles to meet with "consultants" who claimed that our product was flawed because we did not have a "transactional" database, so they wanted to move us to a transactional database like MS SQL-SERVER, and "offered" to re-write the application in ASP for us since it had to be run on Windows now. They were publicly shown as idiots because after going on about how our database was not transactional, when we asked them why we needed a transactional database, they answered "I don't know".
This CEO irritated our main customer so much that we lost them (the lawyer co-founder got arrogant and helped with this too), our new team of 6 salespeople were all trying to cold-call, and so we had basically no sales for last year. By December our company was weeks away from collapse. He had spent the whole year tying the company up in endless meetings and turning in endless reports. This CEO was such a control freak the sales director couldn't meet with the salespeople without the CEO being there.
This guy came across all warm in the beginning, and he had the whole "sincere" act down, but pretty soon you could tell that he didn't think much of those he thought were "little" people. The company still had a possible future, but the CEO was focused on trying to sell the company off for the amount of the revenues still coming to the company, putting everyone else out of a job but guaranteeing him a bonus of $10,000. This probably would have allowed him to tell himself and everyone else he was "successful" in selling the company but he really did his best to drive it into the ground.
This guy even did things like buying 10 laptops from one of his buddies for $3500 each but only putting 5 into use and not telling anyone about the extra 5 laptops.
Now that we don't have a CEO anymore, we are all just doing our jobs and getting things done again. The politics and internal tension of the company which had risen to a fever pitch basically went away with the CEO as well. we are CEO-free, our main customer likely is coming back, sales are up since the 2 salespeople that are left can do their job without people looking over their shoulders all the time about "call numbers" -- and things are looking good!
Beneficial for the Environment
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 1
Alright, sarcasm aside, surely there are bound to be some less-than-good effects on the surrounding enviroment if large amounts of water are 'sucked' out of the atmosphere prematurely?
Sure it can have a negative effect on the environment, just like the negative effects from the millions of cars on the road daily.
It can also have a very positive effect on the environment -- Mosquitoes breed in stagnant pools of water, and they transmit Malaria, which kills millions of people every year.
Global warming has increased the spread of malaria, for which there is no vaccine. Right now it kills people mainly in sub-saharan Africa, although it causes 350 million to 500 million infections in a broad swath around the equator, and as the world warms it is spreading farther north.
Right now fresh water is becoming really scarce, too, -- China is having a huge groundwater crisis as their pollution is contaminating their groundwater supplies. Their huge demand for water is sucking water out of the ground and sucking the pollution into the major underground aquifers.
There are a lot of places where the water table is seriously being lowered because of our greed for water, and this is causing real problems, in the California, Texas, and India amnong many other places where the water table has been lowered hundreds of feet. The ground can subside because of loss of support from the water table, and seawater can start contaminating it, rendering wells useless. Conserving our groundwater can be tremendously helpful.
I don't really see why anyone would think there'd be any mass market appeal at all regarding this project.
[snip] So please, seriously - tell us WHY anyone outside the "live open or die" community will care?
Au Contraire, everyone cares -- because the wireless companies have such control that the current offerings in the phone industry really suck.
Witness the current excitement over the iPhone -- it's one step closer to actually doing something really useful with all the processing power of the phone in your pocket, and people are going wild over it. Sure it's not open by any means, but the whole "open" thing means that everyone will now get the chance to try to realize their own version of a useful mobile computing device.
The weekend before the iPhone came out, I was seriously considering getting a PSP just to have a small portable wireless browsing device, but the thing was dog-slow and I couldn't enter text in any decent fashion.
My Verizon phone has bluetooth mangled on it so that I can't transfer pictures and ringtones on it, though I can use it as a wireless modem through bluetooth, which rocks. I just don't want to have to carry my Macbook around just to check bank balances and email when I am traveling or running errands. The more competition is in this space, the more we will genuinely get useful devices, not just the tiny mobile versions of the black AT&T phone (with camera) that most people have. I would buy the iPhone even if it didn't make phone calls.
Apple sees this need, and everyone is wildly excited about it. The "open" phones will be the competition that helps make the next generation of cellphones truly useful
I feel pretty good that this was removed from the bill just because it was so vauge that many many activities might come under its scope.
The bill is much more specific than that. The reason that you would not come under the scope of this bill is that you are probably not being paid more than $25,000 per quarter to do your "blogging".
This bill only applies to those shills who are paid more than $100,000 per year to influence opinions through their writing, so even if your announcement goes to a million people you wouldn't be affected. You said that you are not an employee, so even if you are earning more than that per year, you still aren't being paid to do your "blogging", but you are earning your own money through your own selling efforts.
There are many others who are very unethical and are being paid huge amounts of money to influence public opinion without disclosing who their backers are -- this is wrong and this is what the bill would have helped bring out into the open.
He says he'll take food from the "field" rather than from the "factory" any day, which is a position that makes a lot of sense.
You take him as a no-food-change luddite, and quickly set up your "straw man" argument, and knock it down saying food has changed over time.
The point is that any selective breeding (which has all been done "in the field") has been proven safe over thousands and even tens of thousands of years. Any changes that were made are using the same mechanisms for change that happen naturally in the field all the time, just helped along by the farmer.
Rejecting GM and processed food makes all the sense in the world, because whatever testing has happened may have been done only for a few months, generally by biased researchers that get their paychecks from the company creating the product -- no conflict of interest there. I prefer to use foods and processing methods tested over thousands of years and by thousands of people, thank you very much.
A great example is the trans fats -- they have only been around less than a hundred years, and are already banned in some countries (Denmark, for one) and efforts are underway to ban them in the US too. Trans fats make food much more profitable for corporations, but they are shown to increase the risk of heart problems, cancer, diabetes, and other things as well.
I eat only organic food (as much as possible, of course) because I prefer not to use my body as the testing ground for the latest lab creations.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a huge amount that we don't know about genes. It was just recently thought that 95% of our DNA was "junk" DNA because it did not have a function that scientists understood. Then it was found out that over 500 segments of this "Junk" DNA was ultraconserved among vertrebrate animals. This means that there must be some highly important reason why it was unchanged over 75 million years of evolution. Some scientists have also found a similarity of the patterns of the dna to human language , which is pretty interesting as well.
Not only that, but human twins are not perfectly identical, and show many minor variances in gene expression. The cloned drug sniffing dogs may well be practically identical, especially if they are raised in similar environments, but this will definitely be affected by the actual cloning techniques involved.
In any case, we will have to wait to find out what the results are before passing judgement. Whatever the results are, science will definitely be advanced through this project, which is a wonderful goal in itself.
Your email, address, friends, music, books, other interests, and who you're dating are all available on Facebook for whoever wants that information, together with your political views, club associations, educational background, possibly even your job history.
Besides the information that you yourself put online, Facebook also contains information that it actively gains about you through other means -- just check their privacy policy: Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience. So there is a profile of you in Facebook that you don't have access to, but also contains logs of chats that you have had from IM services that sold your chats to Facebook! Plus blog posts mentioning you and who knows what else -- that's pretty creepy.
The US government has let it be known that they want "Total Information Awareness" for a while, and sites like Facebook end up linking all kinds of intimate personal details of large groups of people, making it one of the ideal sources for gathering that information.
The CIA is using Facebook as a recruiting tool , but Facebook itself also seems to have gotten its funding from people from people heavily involved in the CIA.
The CIA has also been very interested in student activities for decades. Most of today's leaders got started in political activities as students, and students are much less guarded about their self-expression, so it makes sense that universities would be perfect places to start gathering information for anyone planning to influence future political events.
So go ahead and post all your personal information online, but just be aware of people other than advertisers who might be looking at it and why.
There is no definition of "unlawful combatants" in the Geneva Conventions. There is only the distinction between "lawful combatants" (the enemy you are fighting) and ordinary citizens - if you're not one, you're the other. Relevant laws apply to both situations.
I won't even respond to the rest -- it's all well documented, unless you're the kind that considers CNN to be the equivalent of "Al Jazeera".
"Political Protesters" is the target of these non-lethal systems. As Americans get more and more unhappy with the direction the country is taking, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the two ruling parties are cooperating rather than competing, people will realize that voting is largely ineffectual.
The Democrats were elected to "bring home the troops". So what did they do? The Democrats provided Bush with all the funding for the Iraq war that he wanted, and have yet to substantially limit Bush's power. When the ballot box is proven useless as a means of creating change, you will have people exercising their rights of free speech, protesting loudly in large gatherings in American cities.
These will turn into massive political protests as Americans demand change. That will be the time when the non-lethal crowd control measures that this administration has been so energetically developing will be used -- against the people who will be protesting the administration.
What people don't know is that cell phones already have sophisticated built-in surveillance systems that work even when the phones seem to be off
A 16-year-old girl in Washington state, her mother, aunt, and friends, are going through a nightmare right now with a stalker recording conversations through the cell phone mic and viewing their actions through the cell phone camera even when the phone seemed to be off. Covering the camera lens with tape and taking out the battery from the phone seems to be the only defenses that work.
from the article:
If cell phone surveillance is so easy to abuse, then our intelligence agencies are probably abusing it.
What would be the best tool to track large numbers of US Citizens ("terrorists?") at once? "Presence Technologies" would make it very easy to abuse whole groups of people at once. The FBI made secret tapes of Martin Luther King to discredit him, then made preparations to promote someone "to assume the role of leadership of the Negro people when King has been completely discredited".
Once the technology is perfected, it won't be any harder to add to all the cell phones in the US than the remote listening capabilities were. Tools like this would reduce the amount of manpower it would need to track many thousands of people at once, and make recordings to privately threaten them with when necessary. Projects like the defunct "Total Information Awareness" demonstrate the desire of the government to know "everything" about it's citizens.
Wired magazine predicted all this in 2001 .
Because if it can be abused, it will.
You haven't examined anything. The parent post uses some high-sounding words and a few straw-man attacks, and then somehow gets modded +1 insightful.
The Enron conspiracy was true even before it was proven to be true in a court of law. You and your high-school buddy mods would have used the exact same accusations of "whackjob" against a post suggesting that Enron could be gaming the electricity market. Why? because there is no thinking in the accusations, just reflex.
I guess MCI/ Worldcom CEO Bernie Ebbers wasn't really convicted of conpsiracy to commit securities fraud in the $11 Billion Worldcom collapse. Again, there's plenty of proof.
Both of the above conspiracies have been proven in a court of law. The oil market is many times larger than the California electricity market, so there is plenty of motive there.
"Critical Thinking Skills" should include a better understanding of how the world works, not some pollyanna "no one would try to cheat me" attitude. That type of head-in-the-sand attitude helps no one.
What amazes me is that the parent post is the one that dredges up the whackjob conspiracy theories, and then somehow gets modded "insightful". The kind of anger and vitriol in the post is not helpful, either. This is not Digg -- if you disagree, at least put some reasoning into it, and not just name-calling
If you're at all interested in the forces at work behind the "car of the future" topic, you owe it to yourself to see the movie Who Killed the Electric Car?
The state of California mandated in the 1990's that 10% of the cars sold in California be emission-free, so GM and Toyota put out all-electric vehicles. The cars had a top range of 80-100 miles before recharging, but since most people only drive around 36 miles a day, that was a non-issue for many people.
Here are some of the issues the film discusses:
1) the people who leased the cars were absolutely in love with them and thought that they were very well-engineered
2) The people who leased the cars tried desperately to buy them, but were never allowed to. GM turned down $1.9 million for the 78 uncrushed EV-1's before they were finally crushed.
3) All of the electric cars were crushed, even the brand-new ones, after the companies who made them promised that wouldn't happen.
4) The drivers of the electric cars really loved the engineering and handling of the cars.
5) The federal government joined the car manufacturers in a suit against the state of California fighting the 10% zero-emissions law.
6) one person in the movie told about a congressman who told him to get the electric car killed before it spread to other states (or the congressman would "battle" him)
7) The electric cars were so simple to work on that major dealership revenue sources would have been lost.
8) Consumers were very interested in lowering emissions and helping the environment, and were also willing to pay to do it.
The top 3 oil companies in America pulled in well over $700 BILLION for the last two years, without even looking at the record profits for the previous years. The movie makes a serious case that there was a serious push against the electric car to preserve those future profits from harm and keep the electric car from being a mainstream idea / product.
Some might call this a conspiracy theory and there are market forces involved, but it also really just sounds like intelligent business practices by the oil companies. Given the tremendous needs in the marketplace now, and the advances in technology, it will really be very interesting to see how this market develops.
While the above might seem like cynicism, but the truth is that the FBI has been abusing its power for a long, long, time.
in 1971 the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI raided an FBI office and published over 1000 classified FBI documents, revealing domestic political repression campaigns such as Operation Cointelpro A year later the FBI officially terminated the program.
The public outrage led to an official Congressional investigation of the FBI which gave a report in 1976 that had this to say: "Americans are now aware of the capability and proven willingness of their Government to collect intelligence about their lawful activities and associations. What some suspected and others feared has turned out to be largely true -- vigorous expression of unpopular views, association with dissenting groups, participation in peaceful protest activities, have provoked both government surveillance and retaliation." Sound Familiar?
The report goes on to say: "Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone "bugs", surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous -- and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations -- have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity. Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed... Remember, these are not "conspiracy theorists" talking -- this is an actual government report from 30 years ago documenting the behavior of the previous 40 years.
These are people who pretend to be part of the targeted group and commit acts of violence and incite others to commit acts of violence in order to justify the violent police responce to follow.
Even if all that fails, the police can still lie and say that they were defending themselves, as the National Guard did at Kent State. They shot and killed four students, claiming that someone fired on them, when the order "Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!" was recorded on an audiotape.
All of this makes it that much more important that the events be recorded so everyone can see the truth of the matter.
We really need more people filming the police.
It seems that police brutality is getting so common now that they are willing to beat members of the media on camera . (The clip begins with the narrator suggesting that the protestors were "asking for it" by throwing rocks at the police, but they can't spin the footage of their own camerapeople getting beaten up.)
What's worse, is that police now tend to focus on people with cameras , as you can also see in the above video.
The tapes are very helpful in prosecuting police misconduct , so we neeed more people taping.
Otherwise, the police tend to lie about the incidents , even going so far to claim in the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in Britain that 5 different cameras watching the action were all somehow not functioning .
In a Missouri case, a teenager was being harassed by the police at a DUI checkpoint for not telling them where he was going -- when he asked why he was being detained, he was told "If you don't stop running your mouth, we're going to find a reason to lock you up tonight".
Cameras are getting tinier and tinier all the time, and now we have Wi-Fi enabled storage cards. When cameras get so small the cops can't see them, and people can record the content wirelessly to hidden devices, it will be a lot harder for the bad cops to stop the filming of the brutality.
This liquid lens technology sounds like it might really help create tiny and cheap cameras that people can use to bring more justice to the world.
It seems that police brutality is getting so common now that they are willing to beat members of the media on camera . (The clip begins with the narrator suggesting that the protestors were "asking for it" by throwing rocks at the police, but they can't spin the footage of their own camerapeople getting beaten up.)
What's worse, is that police now tend to focus on people with cameras , as you can also see in the above video.
The tapes are very helpful in prosecuting police misconduct , so we neeed more people taping.
Otherwise, the police tend to lie about the incidents , even going so far to claim in the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in Britain that 5 different cameras watching the action were all somehow not functioning .
In a Missouri case, a teenager was being harassed by the police at a DUI checkpoint for not telling them where he was going -- when he asked why he was being detained, he was told If you don't stop running your mouth, we're going to find a reason to lock you up tonight.
Stuff like this happens all the time, and it will be a great day when we can start getting more of it on tape. Then the police can keep policing the citizens, but the citizens can also police the police.
The two parties are working together to make sure no one else gets in and spoils their "party". For example, there is an excellent article describing how the presidential "debates" are controlled to prevent any other parties from gaining traction. They realized that Ross Perot got 90% of his support after the debates, so they created a system to prevent any other parties from being able to join by raising the bar high enough. The "Commission on Presidential Debates" which runs the debates, is totally run by the two parties. In the article, it quotes Walter Cronkite as calling the CPD an "unconscionable fraud".
The "debates" are also very carefully controlled (according to the article) of presenting the appearance of being a debate without actually being a debate, so as to pose no danger to the candidates, and so that important issues can be avoided.
Ron Paul, a current presidential candidate and member of the Republican party, said recently on the Daily Show that he is only a Republican because he couldn't get elected if he were a member of another party. He wrote an essay on how the two-party system disenfranchises voters.
That's already happening with the no-fly list. A Princeton professor who gave a televised speech criticizing Bush's constitutional overreach found himself on the no-fly list afterwards. A guy who wrote a book called "Bush's Brain" about Karl Rove found himself on the no-fly list afterwards. 20 Wisconsin peace activists suddenly found themselves on the no-fly list .
The no-fly list is even being used to harass opposition political party members. Senator Ted Kennedy suddenly found himself on the no-fly list and had a lot of trouble getting himself off the list. The head of the TSA had to call him personally and promise to take him off the list before his troubles ended. In the same article, it talks about employees of the ACLU also ending up on the list.
Giving the government more secret and anonymous "lists" to deny people rights is not an invitation to abuse, it's a guarantee of it. The fact that systems like this from previous fascist governments are being implemented in modern-day America is one reason that people are arguing that America is on a well-planned transition to fascism.
This is interesting because it shows that the "locals" in Africa are becoming aware of the value of land for eco-tourism and the value of the fresh, clean water in the area.
Hopefully this discovery can help the citizens of Uganda fight back against cronyism and corporatism and help preserve nature.
If the land gets razed, it will only go to make more sugar and palm oil plantations, which would just go into making more Twinkies or other junk food. I am really glad there are people fighting to preserve the land and the monkeys!
This reminds me of the case (again, near Atlanta) of a vegan being arrested and sent to jail for writing down the license plate number of an unmarked cop car that Homeland Security sent to photograph the protester.
Fortunately the ACLU took up the case .
To show the truth of this, and to point out the absurdity, anyone who is engaged in political protest is targeted in an effort to intimidate -- even the police themselves. When the police publicly protested the slow pace of their contract talks with the city, they too were videotaped, photographed, and harassed . They were very surprised, because they were police themselves.
If you look at that situation in terms of the system being mostly in maintaining itself, then it would be natural for the system to fear and harass anyone pushing for change, even the police themselves.
Hopefully the "new media" of blogs and other internet information will help become an effective counterweight to the immense power of the authoritarian elements of our government. Meanwhile, don't be too surprised at finding other examples of creeping authoritarianism in our country. A grandmother in Atlanta was shot and killed by plainclothes police when they invaded her home no-knock raid at night . She thought they were robbers trying to break in when she wounded three of them and was killed by return fire. All they found in her house was a small amount of marijuana. They tried to get an informant to lie and say that he told them that drugs were being sold there after the whole affair becam a public relations nightmare.
Tivo has to make some kind of partnership to survive -- it simply doesn't make sense otherwise.
I bought a used series 2 TIVO for $50, but they were charging $20 / mo. and I had to sign up for a year's contract to get any service.
Comcast only charges me $11.95 / mo. for their DVR and I can run it month to month so I can ditch it when something more mature and cheaper comes to the market. Tivo just seem like jerks compared to that, but it's because they are so desperate they have to act like a cell-phone company. Even if you give someone a gift certificate, it only counts *towards* them signing up for a 1-year contract.
I laughed when I saw Apple's iTV offering, but then I heard Disney had already sold over $1 Million worth of downloaded movies over iTunes. Then I started thinking about what could happen if I let go of the cable TV (at $60 / month) and just ordered the shows I want over iTunes -- the only show I care about is the Daily Show, and anything else I watch is really just a distraction from my life.
The good thing about this is that it shows that the market is moving to an iTunes distribution model, and that kind of competition will only help everyone. iTunes is the competition space here though, not Netflix
.This is one of the most laughable things I have ever heard.
CD prices were always higher than the equivalent cassette tape, which was much more complicated to produce and had the same production and marketing costs.
FTA: For example, when you hear a song played on the radio -- that didn't just happen! Labels make investments in artists by paying for both the production and the promotion of the album, and promotion is very expensive.
The only thing that gets played on the radio is the latest Britney Spears bubblegum crap-ola. In fact, Mandy Moore recently apologized for making such bad music
So we have to pay for all the payola in getting the radio stations bribed to play the songs on the radio.
And then when a CD gets scratched, broken, or stolen, do we get a free replacement? Oh no, we have to pay the full retail cost all over again even though the RIAA wants us to think that we have somehow "licensed" the music from them.
I am glad that they are sweating, which they must be in order to be trying to play the "victim" game. The days of the Internet are here to stay, and bands can finally distribute their own music without getting shafted.
In the linked article it says that only 10% of all CD's make a profit. The other 90% of CD's put the bands into debt to the record companies, making it a really bad deal to sign a record contract. Courtney Love does the math.
The RIAA sounds desperate, and I hope they are -- it would serve them right.
The sheer ease of starting a business with Linux and other open-source technologies (MySQL, PHP, ruby, etc) gives Linux the the advantage over Unix. If the company grows, we will just keep using what works.
I am currently working in a 10-man startup company that delivers employment training over the Web. Our system runs off a cluster of 3 boxes in a LAMP configuration, and we never paid a dime for server software.
Linux dedicated hosting is much cheaper than Windows dedicated hosting, and there are so many tutorials and packages out there that make it really easy to learn and deploy open-source systems.
Sun and company have started their battle way too late for anything but niche deployments -- the King of "Big Iron", IBM, long ago threw in the mainframe towel in favor of Linux.
My Dad used to run a university library, and he was always very forward - looking in terms of IT. He wanted to get a Sun server to run thin-client systems for the library patrons to use rather than having to clean the Windows systems every day, and he could not get a Sun salesperson to talk to him (this was about 12 years ago).
The main library software ran on Sun servers (that they bought through the software vendor), and he was highly impressed with the stability of the Sun boxes. He was so impressed that when the time came for PC's to be installed in the library, he wanted to put 20 thin-client terminals in that ran sessions on a second Sun server. That plan ended because he could not get Sun to talk to him -- he literally could not get the sales people there to call him back to sell him the system.
The end result was that he had to install the 20 PC's and deal with the viruses, downloaded software and other daily headaches of the Windows world and Sun lost an easy sale because they were too arrogant to care.
Sun should have been fighting way back then -- Linux is way too mature now, and way too cheap and easy to deploy. In these days of Ubuntu livecd's and Macs running on top of Linux, anyone who is not a Windows person who is interested in computing will learn Linux. Sun may have a few legacy apps, it looks like they will just be a niche player at best. Sun was legendary for their stability, but our Linux boxes have all the stability we need.
I am sure Unix will have it's niches here and there, but Linux is way too strong at this point.
It seems that the arrogant jerks are the ones who want to be CEO, from my experience.
I work for a small startup that finally had a really profitable year, and made $600K profit in '05-'06 off of our main customer. There were only about 8 people in the company, so that was pretty good -- we had a lawyer, two programmers (including me) and some salespeople.
Sales were really good, and the company decided it needed some "leadership" - so a CEO was hired -- this guy was a retired CEO of a call center. (we were a web training startup, so this was a big WTF for me, but I had no say in it)
This CEO then basically decides to spend the whole year keeping everyone tied up in meetings. At the first all-company meeting (we were all telecommuting) a co-worker said "this looks really bad -- there are monre chiefs in this company than indians" -- out of 8 people, 5 were executives and 4 were regular workers.
Our product is web training based on PHP and Mysql, so he had the lead programmer (the co-founder) driving a 100 miles to meet with "consultants" who claimed that our product was flawed because we did not have a "transactional" database, so they wanted to move us to a transactional database like MS SQL-SERVER, and "offered" to re-write the application in ASP for us since it had to be run on Windows now. They were publicly shown as idiots because after going on about how our database was not transactional, when we asked them why we needed a transactional database, they answered "I don't know".
This CEO irritated our main customer so much that we lost them (the lawyer co-founder got arrogant and helped with this too), our new team of 6 salespeople were all trying to cold-call, and so we had basically no sales for last year. By December our company was weeks away from collapse. He had spent the whole year tying the company up in endless meetings and turning in endless reports. This CEO was such a control freak the sales director couldn't meet with the salespeople without the CEO being there.
This guy came across all warm in the beginning, and he had the whole "sincere" act down, but pretty soon you could tell that he didn't think much of those he thought were "little" people. The company still had a possible future, but the CEO was focused on trying to sell the company off for the amount of the revenues still coming to the company, putting everyone else out of a job but guaranteeing him a bonus of $10,000. This probably would have allowed him to tell himself and everyone else he was "successful" in selling the company but he really did his best to drive it into the ground.
This guy even did things like buying 10 laptops from one of his buddies for $3500 each but only putting 5 into use and not telling anyone about the extra 5 laptops.
Now that we don't have a CEO anymore, we are all just doing our jobs and getting things done again. The politics and internal tension of the company which had risen to a fever pitch basically went away with the CEO as well. we are CEO-free, our main customer likely is coming back, sales are up since the 2 salespeople that are left can do their job without people looking over their shoulders all the time about "call numbers" -- and things are looking good!
Alright, sarcasm aside, surely there are bound to be some less-than-good effects on the surrounding enviroment if large amounts of water are 'sucked' out of the atmosphere prematurely?
Sure it can have a negative effect on the environment, just like the negative effects from the millions of cars on the road daily.
It can also have a very positive effect on the environment -- Mosquitoes breed in stagnant pools of water, and they transmit Malaria, which kills millions of people every year.
Global warming has increased the spread of malaria, for which there is no vaccine. Right now it kills people mainly in sub-saharan Africa, although it causes 350 million to 500 million infections in a broad swath around the equator, and as the world warms it is spreading farther north.Right now fresh water is becoming really scarce, too, -- China is having a huge groundwater crisis as their pollution is contaminating their groundwater supplies. Their huge demand for water is sucking water out of the ground and sucking the pollution into the major underground aquifers.
There are a lot of places where the water table is seriously being lowered because of our greed for water, and this is causing real problems, in the California, Texas, and India amnong many other places where the water table has been lowered hundreds of feet. The ground can subside because of loss of support from the water table, and seawater can start contaminating it, rendering wells useless. Conserving our groundwater can be tremendously helpful.
I don't really see why anyone would think there'd be any mass market appeal at all regarding this project.
[snip] So please, seriously - tell us WHY anyone outside the "live open or die" community will care?
Au Contraire, everyone cares -- because the wireless companies have such control that the current offerings in the phone industry really suck.
Witness the current excitement over the iPhone -- it's one step closer to actually doing something really useful with all the processing power of the phone in your pocket, and people are going wild over it. Sure it's not open by any means, but the whole "open" thing means that everyone will now get the chance to try to realize their own version of a useful mobile computing device.
The weekend before the iPhone came out, I was seriously considering getting a PSP just to have a small portable wireless browsing device, but the thing was dog-slow and I couldn't enter text in any decent fashion.
My Verizon phone has bluetooth mangled on it so that I can't transfer pictures and ringtones on it, though I can use it as a wireless modem through bluetooth, which rocks. I just don't want to have to carry my Macbook around just to check bank balances and email when I am traveling or running errands. The more competition is in this space, the more we will genuinely get useful devices, not just the tiny mobile versions of the black AT&T phone (with camera) that most people have. I would buy the iPhone even if it didn't make phone calls.
Apple sees this need, and everyone is wildly excited about it. The "open" phones will be the competition that helps make the next generation of cellphones truly useful
I feel pretty good that this was removed from the bill just because it was so vauge that many many activities might come under its scope.
The bill is much more specific than that. The reason that you would not come under the scope of this bill is that you are probably not being paid more than $25,000 per quarter to do your "blogging".
This bill only applies to those shills who are paid more than $100,000 per year to influence opinions through their writing, so even if your announcement goes to a million people you wouldn't be affected. You said that you are not an employee, so even if you are earning more than that per year, you still aren't being paid to do your "blogging", but you are earning your own money through your own selling efforts.
There are many others who are very unethical and are being paid huge amounts of money to influence public opinion without disclosing who their backers are -- this is wrong and this is what the bill would have helped bring out into the open.
You totally missed the OP's point.
He says he'll take food from the "field" rather than from the "factory" any day, which is a position that makes a lot of sense.
You take him as a no-food-change luddite, and quickly set up your "straw man" argument, and knock it down saying food has changed over time.
The point is that any selective breeding (which has all been done "in the field") has been proven safe over thousands and even tens of thousands of years. Any changes that were made are using the same mechanisms for change that happen naturally in the field all the time, just helped along by the farmer.
Rejecting GM and processed food makes all the sense in the world, because whatever testing has happened may have been done only for a few months, generally by biased researchers that get their paychecks from the company creating the product -- no conflict of interest there. I prefer to use foods and processing methods tested over thousands of years and by thousands of people, thank you very much.
A great example is the trans fats -- they have only been around less than a hundred years, and are already banned in some countries (Denmark, for one) and efforts are underway to ban them in the US too. Trans fats make food much more profitable for corporations, but they are shown to increase the risk of heart problems, cancer, diabetes, and other things as well.
I eat only organic food (as much as possible, of course) because I prefer not to use my body as the testing ground for the latest lab creations.