Funny how people always seem to accuse me of "knee-jerk" responses when I try and be rational and polite in discussing a subject while also trying to present a compromise that both sides might be able to work with.
All the gun owners I know are also very responsible and have also had some degree of training. But I'm sure that you, like me, do not know everyone in the county. Your friends are equally intelligent to you, so of course they are going to have similar skills and opinions, if they didn't they wouldn't be your friends. Its the rest of the people, the one who are dumber than you, and outnumber you and your friends by a fair margin that you have to worry about.
I know my US and world history way better than most of the people who have graduated from American schools in the last 20 years. Maybe not as well as you do since you act like you have a Phd in American history but well enough to know that you are right about how lists will be used to stripe people of their guns if they let them.
I also find it amusing that you cite the DC sniper, even if every person in DC had had a gun on them it wouldn't have saved a single life. What was your point on that one again?
A better event would have been to cite the Luby's Massacre", thats the one I always bring up to support my position that people should be able to carry. Suzanna Hupp would have been able to shoot the gunman before the second person was shot, but she had had to leave her gun in car. As a result 23 dead, including her parents.
And as to New Orleans, a citation please. I'm not saying it didn't happen but if I'm going to start citing it myself I would like to know more.
And again in regards to New Orleans, what did you do about it? Scream about lists, shake your fist impotently in the night at the government? Or did you do something to try ensure it doesn't happen again? What could you do? I don't know, but if you didn't do anything then you are part of the problem.
My honest take on the situation. Have no fucking laws about it at all. If someone wants to carry a gun, great! They pull it out and shoot themselves or someone else is faster and shoots them first Fantastic!! Darwin in action. Someone innocent get caught in the crossfire, oh well, they should have ducked faster, Darwin again.
Keep in mind that just because someone tries to present a balanced plan to try and get two opposing sides to agree it does not make them a whining knee-jerk liberal! You obviously never learned that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Sorry, I missed the part in your posting about "static" camber, something the OP never mentioned. In that regard you are correct. Perhaps next time you should try taking a less aggressive tone and more people will understand what your saying rather than being distracted by thoughts of you being various parts of a horse.
Wow, a few seconds on google and I found something that contradicts your statement about camber.
The amounts of camber gain varies from car to car, team to team and even by the engineer’s philosophy on suspension set-up.
and
Pushing the bodywork down (such as when the wings develop down-force) compresses the suspension, and if the car has a camber gain curve, the camber angle will increase. This change in camber may be desirable during high speed cornering
whether you believe something or not is up to you.
For me it depends on how much I trust the authority stating the information. In this case I'm giving the source a fair amount of weight and consider the sources to be valid.
I guess you don't consider a professor of informatics at Technical University, Munich, to be a credible source. I don't know, and don't really care.
100 million lines of code does not necessarily translate into a 100 million lines of instruction code once compiled so it really depends on what they are counting, comments+instructions or just instructions. I was taught that good code should be self documenting, so for every line of instruction generating code there should be a nice chunk of comments that explains what it does. A 100 million lines does not sound unreasonable if they are counting comments, and since they don't clarify exactly what they are counting it is best to assume that they are counting everything in the source, comments+instructions.
And not everyone believes in Jesus, though I will say that he had some good advice on how to live, though a lot of people who claim to follow his teachings ignore it.
I find it interesting that you would bring it up to support your claims. Sounds like you have issues with religion, Christianity in particulate.
My 78 Ford has an electronic ignition control module that would be toast if it was hit with an EMP. Fortunately Zombies don't generally use EM weapons so a shielded EIC is somewhat low on my list of upgrades.
Just how many of the Mumbai attackers were using Blackberrys? And how many will, as already pointed out, just use something else. Plain old walkie-talkies and code words maybe?
Make sure the whatever app/phone you use does not require cell service to work.
Had this problem with one of my old phones years ago, if it didn't have signal to a tower it was a paper weight.
I don't have a smartphone so I don't know if this is still an issue.
I would second (third, fourth, N+1) getting a dedicated GPS unit if you need one for hiking. Its always better to get something built for the job than a hacked solution, just not as much fun.
Another possibility is that the text books and "approved methods" of teaching got fucked with by some "expert" who thought teaching methods should be updated.
Or, this is how the brain would naturally interpret a problem unless it had a true mathematical twist to it and the issue is more along the lines of the overworked and underpaid teachers being put in charge of a class of 30+ students and not being able to really teach them anything for lack of time to spend with each student.
Valid point, The Schmeiser case is a bit of a red hearing.
We can't say it wasn't accidental contamination of the original crop, we also can't say it was. The issue was never addressed in court. Remember that when he used Roundup on the original crop 60% survived, those are the ones he got the his seeds from. It follows that the crop raised from those seeds would be 98% resistant since only resistant plants survived the initial Roundup application on the original crop.
And your right, Monsanto did not sue him for getting the seed illegally, because no one could prove where he got the original seeds for the crop from. Monsanto sued because their IP was in his plants and he didn't have a license for it (same as if MS sued you for having a copy of Office on your systems with no license, doesn't mater how it got there if you were using it). Schmieser couldn't have known about the RR gene in the plant unless he had tested the plants, or as your position states he had knowingly secured the RR seeds from somewhere, unproven but possible. It should be noted that Roundup resistance can develop naturally via selective breeding, just look at the coca plants in Columbia.
The Schmieser case aside there is still the fact that in the study linked in the summary they found plants that contain GM traits from two different strains in the same plant, which indicates that somehow the traits were shared between the strains of GM'd plants, likely via pollen. It follows from there that the traits might spread to non GM'd plants via the same processes.
The big question is, has anyone really checked if the GM'd traits can spread to non-GM'd plants of the same variety?
If you think my position that traits from GM plants can spread to non-GM plants via pollination is wrong then send links to your sources that support your contention that cross pollination can't happen. I'm willing to listen to new evidence.
According to some research the Sun is getting warmer, which means the habitable zone is moving out. One of the estimates I heard put it at only a few million years till Earth is going to be too hot for humans, or much of anything else.
"Moreover, two samples contained multiple genes from different species of genetically modified plants. "It indicates that these things are probably self-perpetuating outside of cultivation and have been there for a couple of generations at least," Sagers says.
Since some of the plants contained traits from different varieties of GM'd plants. The only way a plant could have ended up with both traits would be if the traits had been transferred via pollen.
So Schmeiser could have been correct in his claim.
Cool, you actually read them. I'm not a speed reader so I didn't take the time to read them all the way through. Gold star for you.
Did you also read the other links? I'll get back to those in a bit.
re:Schmeiser; From Wiki; "He had used Roundup herbicide to clear weeds around power poles and in ditches adjacent to a public road running beside one of his fields, So Schmeiser noticed that some of the wild rapeseed plants survived being hit with roundup and checked the rest of his field to see if the roundup resistance was present. Upon discovering that it was he planted a test field with it. So, the question is how did the "Roundup Ready" genes get into his field? Schmeiser claimed pollen from a neighbor must have contaminated the field, Monsanto didn't challenge that claim in court. Since no one, not even Monsanto, has been able to show that Scheimser obtained "Roundup Ready" seed from another source we (obviously not including you) can conclude that he is likely telling the truth. There is no conclusive evidence either way that it was accidental or not.
We have also become distracted from an important point here, the one the original article brings up. Plants containing genetically modified DNA are in the wild and likely cross pollinating with wild plants. Since Monsanto, or anyone else, has indicated that transfering the RR trait through cross pollination is impossible it is a reasonable assumption that it is occurring and that Schmieser's field was cross contaminated. That may be why Monsanto dropped the charge that Schmieser obtained the seed intentionally, they new they couldn't prove it.
Based upon review of the available information I concede that you are correct in the claim that Monsanto has not yet sued a farmer for proven accidental cross pollination. But the key word here is proven, it has not be dis-proven either.
You still failed to address the other links that back my position that GMO has unforeseen negative impact on the environment. All the fire and fury around Monsanto and farms is really kind of irelivant when you realize that while GM plants may have short (less than 10 years) term benefits in the long run (+20 years) they are going to hurt us far more. Here is another link for you that related more to the important issue of the harm GMd plants are implicated in causing.
On a side note I must say I am enjoying this conversation. It is always good to have your views challenged by the presentation of opposing information, though your replies have been a bit scarce in anything that seriously makes me reconsider my views. Of course you can say the same thing about mine.
If the initial pulse is short and intense enough there would be little risk of ignition even from a volatile material.
If I remember this right it is a matter of pumping enough energy into a layer of material to vaporize it almost instantly, the sold=>vapor transition would cool the material by carrying away the heat of the initial pulse. As long as that pulse is really, really, really, short the total amount of heat added to the rest of the material is kept to a minimum.
Sorry, when I used "hybrid" I meant plants that had been selectively bred for specific traits, not "hybrid" in the true meaning as you cite. I will try to be more careful in the future.
Your Google-fu must be weak, a quick search of "monsanto suing farmers" found the following; http://www.organicconsumers.org/Monsanto/farmerssued.cfm http://nelsonfarm.net/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser plus many more so its not an "urban myth" as you currently think.
Though I think the one you cite as being intentional is the Schmieser case. The court found in favor of Monsanto and upheld Monsanto's claim that Schmieser knew the canola he planted contained Monsanto's IP. Remember that just because the court says something it does not always mean that is what happened. And lets face it, Monsanto would not sue someone claiming it was accidental contamination.
As to the worrying about GMO crops your right, there are things to worry about, like this, this and this. Lots more where those came from.
The fact that there is any kind of major dispute over the safety of GMO supports my point that the GM tech belongs in the lab until it is better understood so we don't get things like this happening.
Good point, but once a farmer had purchased a hybrid seed they could keep planting that same hybrid at no extra cost each year until they chose to by a new hybrid.
That is no longer the case where companies like Monsanto is concerned, you have to buy new seed from them each year. And lets not forget that once a farmer goes with Monsanto "Roundup Ready" seed they are now locked into buying herbicide from Monsanto.
Also a concern is if they choose to get non-GM seed they have to worry about Monsanto suing them the next year. As the defendant the Farmer has to prove they didn't keep any seed containing Monsanto's IP, and if you know farming you know that some of last years crop always sprouts up in this years crop. So the farmer is at a distinct disadvantage.
My main issue with GM is that despite all the strides that have been made there is still so much more that we don't know about it. Remember that its not a matter of a specific trait being coded into the genome "by hand" so it does exactly what we want. Its a "cut and paste" operation, the trait gets added but so does extra code that we don't know the effect of. I think the tech was moved out of the lab before it was ready.
Farmers are worse off because they now have the added expense of buying their seeds from Monsanto rather than keeping seeds from the last crop like they have for most of the history of agriculture.
Something to keep in mind about messing with a plants, or anythings, genes. We don't know what we are doing. We can't look at a segment of the genome and say "if we change this amino acid to this other one it will have this effect". Our understanding of genetics has not reached that point yet.
What they have been doing is isolating segments of genomes and saying that "all plants with this segment have trait X". Then they take that segment and insert it into another plant and see if the new plant displays the trait they think it should. If it does then we know that we can add that trait into other plants by adding that segment to it's DNA. They can't shut off the pollen because they don't know how, or if they do they they don't care. Hell lets get a conspiracy theory in here and say maybe Monsanto wants their IP to end up in other fields so they can get more money.
They also have no idea what else those segments of added DNA might do to the organism. Even though they can isolate a specific trait to a certain segment of a DNA strand they don't know what extra instructions may also be in that added strand.
I remember a fruit fly study where they isolated the gene for white eyes and added it to another population of fruit flys expecting them to have white eyes. They did, but they also displayed behavior patterns that were totally unexpected. Instead of milling about randomly like normal flies the engineered flys would line up in and follow each other around like a train. They got the results they wanted, but also some unexpected consequences.
I think GMed plants can be a great benefit to Humanity, once we know exactly what we are doing. Till then this stuff should have stayed in the lab.
Even if they don't know the origin of the meme they still use it because it is known and generally understood by the masses, where as an attempt to introduce a new meme would require a bit of work on their part to promote it. So they just stick to what they know works. Perhaps its more of a "if it works don't fix it" kind of laziness rather than a lack of originality.
Though there does seem to be a fair amount of regurgitation in articles these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny how people always seem to accuse me of "knee-jerk" responses when I try and be rational and polite in discussing a subject while also trying to present a compromise that both sides might be able to work with.
All the gun owners I know are also very responsible and have also had some degree of training. But I'm sure that you, like me, do not know everyone in the county. Your friends are equally intelligent to you, so of course they are going to have similar skills and opinions, if they didn't they wouldn't be your friends. Its the rest of the people, the one who are dumber than you, and outnumber you and your friends by a fair margin that you have to worry about.
I know my US and world history way better than most of the people who have graduated from American schools in the last 20 years. Maybe not as well as you do since you act like you have a Phd in American history but well enough to know that you are right about how lists will be used to stripe people of their guns if they let them.
I also find it amusing that you cite the DC sniper, even if every person in DC had had a gun on them it wouldn't have saved a single life. What was your point on that one again?
A better event would have been to cite the Luby's Massacre", thats the one I always bring up to support my position that people should be able to carry. Suzanna Hupp would have been able to shoot the gunman before the second person was shot, but she had had to leave her gun in car. As a result 23 dead, including her parents.
And as to New Orleans, a citation please. I'm not saying it didn't happen but if I'm going to start citing it myself I would like to know more.
And again in regards to New Orleans, what did you do about it? Scream about lists, shake your fist impotently in the night at the government? Or did you do something to try ensure it doesn't happen again? What could you do? I don't know, but if you didn't do anything then you are part of the problem.
My honest take on the situation. Have no fucking laws about it at all. If someone wants to carry a gun, great! They pull it out and shoot themselves or someone else is faster and shoots them first Fantastic!! Darwin in action. Someone innocent get caught in the crossfire, oh well, they should have ducked faster, Darwin again.
Keep in mind that just because someone tries to present a balanced plan to try and get two opposing sides to agree it does not make them a whining knee-jerk liberal! You obviously never learned that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Sorry, I missed the part in your posting about "static" camber, something the OP never mentioned. In that regard you are correct. Perhaps next time you should try taking a less aggressive tone and more people will understand what your saying rather than being distracted by thoughts of you being various parts of a horse.
Wow, a few seconds on google and I found something that contradicts your statement about camber.
The amounts of camber gain varies from car to car, team to team and even by the engineer’s philosophy on suspension set-up.
and
Pushing the bodywork down (such as when the wings develop down-force) compresses the suspension, and if the car has a camber gain curve, the camber angle will increase. This change in camber may be desirable during high speed cornering
Found this here.
Since your such the expert perhaps you would care to summarize the article for us?
Think you could actually cite something we can read on line? Both the link you give are for book that you have to buy.
And you insult someone who was trying to answer a question, so what if he was wrong? Calling him a retard only shows how limited your vocabulary is.
Great way to back up your statements and boost your credibility.
Now I suspect your going to try and make some biting remark about me and anyone else who calls you on this.
Funny thing is, either way I win. If you don't understand that, well, perhaps you need to work on subtly.
whether you believe something or not is up to you.
For me it depends on how much I trust the authority stating the information. In this case I'm giving the source a fair amount of weight and consider the sources to be valid.
I guess you don't consider a professor of informatics at Technical University, Munich, to be a credible source. I don't know, and don't really care.
100 million lines of code does not necessarily translate into a 100 million lines of instruction code once compiled so it really depends on what they are counting, comments+instructions or just instructions. I was taught that good code should be self documenting, so for every line of instruction generating code there should be a nice chunk of comments that explains what it does. A 100 million lines does not sound unreasonable if they are counting comments, and since they don't clarify exactly what they are counting it is best to assume that they are counting everything in the source, comments+instructions.
And not everyone believes in Jesus, though I will say that he had some good advice on how to live, though a lot of people who claim to follow his teachings ignore it.
I find it interesting that you would bring it up to support your claims. Sounds like you have issues with religion, Christianity in particulate.
A quick Google found this which would seem to support the claim.
Accurate or not I can not say but I have come across the line count elsewhere so it is likely to be reasonably close.
Better double check the electronics.
My 78 Ford has an electronic ignition control module that would be toast if it was hit with an EMP. Fortunately Zombies don't generally use EM weapons so a shielded EIC is somewhat low on my list of upgrades.
PS; you forgot the duct tape.
Someone has to be first. I'm sure we're going to be hearing about this kind of thing more as time goes by.
Just how many of the Mumbai attackers were using Blackberrys? And how many will, as already pointed out, just use something else. Plain old walkie-talkies and code words maybe?
Make sure the whatever app/phone you use does not require cell service to work.
Had this problem with one of my old phones years ago, if it didn't have signal to a tower it was a paper weight.
I don't have a smartphone so I don't know if this is still an issue.
I would second (third, fourth, N+1) getting a dedicated GPS unit if you need one for hiking. Its always better to get something built for the job than a hacked solution, just not as much fun.
Another possibility is that the text books and "approved methods" of teaching got fucked with by some "expert" who thought teaching methods should be updated.
Or, this is how the brain would naturally interpret a problem unless it had a true mathematical twist to it and the issue is more along the lines of the overworked and underpaid teachers being put in charge of a class of 30+ students and not being able to really teach them anything for lack of time to spend with each student.
My 2 Yen.
Murdoch is a complete whack job and a fruitcake.
Unfortunately he also has power and influence, without which he would be ignored like the rest of the nut jobs.
Valid point, The Schmeiser case is a bit of a red hearing.
We can't say it wasn't accidental contamination of the original crop, we also can't say it was. The issue was never addressed in court. Remember that when he used Roundup on the original crop 60% survived, those are the ones he got the his seeds from. It follows that the crop raised from those seeds would be 98% resistant since only resistant plants survived the initial Roundup application on the original crop.
And your right, Monsanto did not sue him for getting the seed illegally, because no one could prove where he got the original seeds for the crop from. Monsanto sued because their IP was in his plants and he didn't have a license for it (same as if MS sued you for having a copy of Office on your systems with no license, doesn't mater how it got there if you were using it). Schmieser couldn't have known about the RR gene in the plant unless he had tested the plants, or as your position states he had knowingly secured the RR seeds from somewhere, unproven but possible. It should be noted that Roundup resistance can develop naturally via selective breeding, just look at the coca plants in Columbia.
The Schmieser case aside there is still the fact that in the study linked in the summary they found plants that contain GM traits from two different strains in the same plant, which indicates that somehow the traits were shared between the strains of GM'd plants, likely via pollen. It follows from there that the traits might spread to non GM'd plants via the same processes.
The big question is, has anyone really checked if the GM'd traits can spread to non-GM'd plants of the same variety?
If you think my position that traits from GM plants can spread to non-GM plants via pollination is wrong then send links to your sources that support your contention that cross pollination can't happen. I'm willing to listen to new evidence.
I knew that.
I just forgot it at the time. Thanks for pointing out and correcting that oversight.
According to some research the Sun is getting warmer, which means the habitable zone is moving out. One of the estimates I heard put it at only a few million years till Earth is going to be too hot for humans, or much of anything else.
from the article in the original post:
"Moreover, two samples contained multiple genes from different species of genetically modified plants. "It indicates that these things are probably self-perpetuating outside of cultivation and have been there for a couple of generations at least," Sagers says.
Since some of the plants contained traits from different varieties of GM'd plants. The only way a plant could have ended up with both traits would be if the traits had been transferred via pollen.
So Schmeiser could have been correct in his claim.
Cool, you actually read them. I'm not a speed reader so I didn't take the time to read them all the way through. Gold star for you.
Did you also read the other links? I'll get back to those in a bit.
re:Schmeiser;
From Wiki; "He had used Roundup herbicide to clear weeds around power poles and in ditches adjacent to a public road running beside one of his fields,
So Schmeiser noticed that some of the wild rapeseed plants survived being hit with roundup and checked the rest of his field to see if the roundup resistance was present. Upon discovering that it was he planted a test field with it. So, the question is how did the "Roundup Ready" genes get into his field? Schmeiser claimed pollen from a neighbor must have contaminated the field, Monsanto didn't challenge that claim in court. Since no one, not even Monsanto, has been able to show that Scheimser obtained "Roundup Ready" seed from another source we (obviously not including you) can conclude that he is likely telling the truth. There is no conclusive evidence either way that it was accidental or not.
We have also become distracted from an important point here, the one the original article brings up. Plants containing genetically modified DNA are in the wild and likely cross pollinating with wild plants. Since Monsanto, or anyone else, has indicated that transfering the RR trait through cross pollination is impossible it is a reasonable assumption that it is occurring and that Schmieser's field was cross contaminated. That may be why Monsanto dropped the charge that Schmieser obtained the seed intentionally, they new they couldn't prove it.
Based upon review of the available information I concede that you are correct in the claim that Monsanto has not yet sued a farmer for proven accidental cross pollination. But the key word here is proven, it has not be dis-proven either.
You still failed to address the other links that back my position that GMO has unforeseen negative impact on the environment. All the fire and fury around Monsanto and farms is really kind of irelivant when you realize that while GM plants may have short (less than 10 years) term benefits in the long run (+20 years) they are going to hurt us far more. Here is another link for you that related more to the important issue of the harm GMd plants are implicated in causing.
On a side note I must say I am enjoying this conversation. It is always good to have your views challenged by the presentation of opposing information, though your replies have been a bit scarce in anything that seriously makes me reconsider my views. Of course you can say the same thing about mine.
I can already see smaller companies going to court to claim that they are being unfairly burdened by the higher cost.
Right or wrong this is going to cause some fur to fly.
If the initial pulse is short and intense enough there would be little risk of ignition even from a volatile material.
If I remember this right it is a matter of pumping enough energy into a layer of material to vaporize it almost instantly, the sold=>vapor transition would cool the material by carrying away the heat of the initial pulse. As long as that pulse is really, really, really, short the total amount of heat added to the rest of the material is kept to a minimum.
This is also how LASIK works.
They are users, nothing more
And they will be used.
~
Sorry, when I used "hybrid" I meant plants that had been selectively bred for specific traits, not "hybrid" in the true meaning as you cite. I will try to be more careful in the future.
Your Google-fu must be weak, a quick search of "monsanto suing farmers" found the following;
http://www.organicconsumers.org/Monsanto/farmerssued.cfm
http://nelsonfarm.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser
plus many more so its not an "urban myth" as you currently think.
Though I think the one you cite as being intentional is the Schmieser case. The court found in favor of Monsanto and upheld Monsanto's claim that Schmieser knew the canola he planted contained Monsanto's IP. Remember that just because the court says something it does not always mean that is what happened. And lets face it, Monsanto would not sue someone claiming it was accidental contamination.
As to the worrying about GMO crops your right, there are things to worry about, like this, this and this. Lots more where those came from.
The fact that there is any kind of major dispute over the safety of GMO supports my point that the GM tech belongs in the lab until it is better understood so we don't get things like this happening.
Enough citations for you?
Good point, but once a farmer had purchased a hybrid seed they could keep planting that same hybrid at no extra cost each year until they chose to by a new hybrid.
That is no longer the case where companies like Monsanto is concerned, you have to buy new seed from them each year. And lets not forget that once a farmer goes with Monsanto "Roundup Ready" seed they are now locked into buying herbicide from Monsanto.
Also a concern is if they choose to get non-GM seed they have to worry about Monsanto suing them the next year. As the defendant the Farmer has to prove they didn't keep any seed containing Monsanto's IP, and if you know farming you know that some of last years crop always sprouts up in this years crop. So the farmer is at a distinct disadvantage.
My main issue with GM is that despite all the strides that have been made there is still so much more that we don't know about it. Remember that its not a matter of a specific trait being coded into the genome "by hand" so it does exactly what we want. Its a "cut and paste" operation, the trait gets added but so does extra code that we don't know the effect of. I think the tech was moved out of the lab before it was ready.
Farmers are worse off because they now have the added expense of buying their seeds from Monsanto rather than keeping seeds from the last crop like they have for most of the history of agriculture.
Something to keep in mind about messing with a plants, or anythings, genes. We don't know what we are doing. We can't look at a segment of the genome and say "if we change this amino acid to this other one it will have this effect". Our understanding of genetics has not reached that point yet.
What they have been doing is isolating segments of genomes and saying that "all plants with this segment have trait X". Then they take that segment and insert it into another plant and see if the new plant displays the trait they think it should. If it does then we know that we can add that trait into other plants by adding that segment to it's DNA. They can't shut off the pollen because they don't know how, or if they do they they don't care. Hell lets get a conspiracy theory in here and say maybe Monsanto wants their IP to end up in other fields so they can get more money.
They also have no idea what else those segments of added DNA might do to the organism. Even though they can isolate a specific trait to a certain segment of a DNA strand they don't know what extra instructions may also be in that added strand.
I remember a fruit fly study where they isolated the gene for white eyes and added it to another population of fruit flys expecting them to have white eyes. They did, but they also displayed behavior patterns that were totally unexpected. Instead of milling about randomly like normal flies the engineered flys would line up in and follow each other around like a train. They got the results they wanted, but also some unexpected consequences.
I think GMed plants can be a great benefit to Humanity, once we know exactly what we are doing. Till then this stuff should have stayed in the lab.
Even if they don't know the origin of the meme they still use it because it is known and generally understood by the masses, where as an attempt to introduce a new meme would require a bit of work on their part to promote it. So they just stick to what they know works. Perhaps its more of a "if it works don't fix it" kind of laziness rather than a lack of originality.
Though there does seem to be a fair amount of regurgitation in articles these days.