So you're ok with child porn then ? Or your bank details appearing on the web ?
Yep, because I care about police finding child porn so they can arrest the child abusers more than I care about making it difficult for pedophiles to masturbate. My financial security also shouldn't depend on the secrecy of a number, but censorship won't help if the number is exposed. I.e. it'd be neigh impossible to automatically sensor that information, and even if it's taken down quickly, you'd still need to move your (remaining) money elsewhere.
You seem to be confusing free speech with censorship. You are entitled to write/say anything you like, but no-one is forced to read/listen.
Censorship prevents free speech. It prevents people from having a choice to listen. Causing immediate harm is one thing, but teaching/telling people unfavorable things is quite another. Going on about how muslims are the scourge of the world is distasteful, and I'd hope people would choose to ignore it or argue with it, but it doesn't actually cause anybody harm.
It seems like economics would push businesses to spend a bit more to make "a very small number of people happy". Say that small number is.5% of internet users. There are ~1.5 billion internet users, so.5% is 7.5 million (~1.5 million if you just care about your continent). Why wouldn't you want a monopoly on those users if your competitors are choosing to ignore them?
Besides, it's not always a choice for people..6% of people are blind, >2% have visual impairment, color blindness is fairly common (~7% of males), as is the inability to purchase a fast internet connection or an up-to-date computer due to geographic or financial reasons.
It's not good to make assumptions about things not existing. Windows 97 was a version of 95 OSR 2 that was modified, rebranded, and pirated. The boot screen and wallpaper stated that name, as did the install disc. I'm also fairly certain I saw it in a US store once, hence the reason I remember it existed. Sure, checking out "System Properties" would reveal what it really was, but I'd hardly expect most end-users to know how to access that dialog. Just be glad they didn't install IE 4.7 while they were at it. =P
It doesn't seem to be just politics/sports, but I haven't had much success with getting it to accurately clump other things.
C++: Failed to get any results (mostly a test to see if "++" threw it off)
Perl: Expected: love it/hate it type clumping; Got: News articles mentioning perl, Ubuntu news, and lots of unclumped results
Anime: Expected: love it/hate it and blogs about the new series (i.e. current news); Got: Mostly unclumped "animal" type articles
Haiku: Expected: a couple articles about poetry, some about the OS, mostly a test of sorting ability and database size; Got: A few relevant results, but no useful clumping
So, yeah. A neat idea, but not terribly useful for stuff other than politics/sports right now. Or perhaps it's been tweaked for mainstream stuff.
IMHO we should go back to publicly displaying the entire legal code on a monument. In theory it'd encourage lawmakers to make the law concise and understandable. I highly doubt that would happen in practice, but at least we would have a space elevator.
AFAIK it's coastal China that does most of the polluting. A quick googling suggests that the population of coastal China is somewhere around twice that of the US, so per capita the US is still worse, but the difference isn't as dramatic. Of course, one could further divide the US and China into major industrial zones and calculate their per capita pollution, so IMHO it's better to look at the benefit provided. The US does get cheap goods, so there's some of the benefit, but China gets money and I'm not familiar enough with their economic situation to say how well that's distributed. It could be that the US's pollution benefits nearly the entire US population whereas China's only benefits an elite few. Or it could be that China's pollution is helping to raise the standard of living of all 1.2 billion Chinese citizens. In any case I think anyone would agree that both China and the US both need to focus more on polluting less rather than figuring out who's the worse polluter.
A quick bit of Googling suggests that modern SSDs are limited to about 1 - 5 million write cycles. Assuming a 32 GB drive with a write speed of 100 MB/sec it would take at least 10 years of continuous writing to hit that limit.
32 GB / 100 MB / sec = 320 sec = 5.33 min
5.33 min / cycle * 1,000,000 cycles = 10.14 years
Also, I've heard that when flash drives fail they simply become read-only. Anyone know if that's true?
Maintaining muscle mass is a significant energy expenditure, about 50 calories per pound of muscle per day. For comparison, running for half an hour burns about 350 calories. It's certainly possible to lose fat through aerobic workouts alone, but it's not as efficient as doing a mixture of aerobic and anaerobic workouts.
Since the US and England differ in more ways than just the gun ban, wouldn't it make more sense to compare England's crime rates before and after the 1997 ban?
I'm certainly no expert, but it looks like homicide increased dramatically until 2002, where it has slowly dropped off until it reached pre-gun-ban levels. Violent crime is a bit more ambiguous, since it peaked in 1995 and was already declining. According to the BBC handgun violence rose 40% in the two years following the ban.
Storing all that data would require absolutely immense processing and storage capabilities which simply don't exist.
It is a lot of data, but I wouldn't discount the possibility of storing it. The nuclear human genome is something like 3 billion base pairs. That's 2.8 GB per person. But, each base pair has only 4 possibilities, so each byte could store 4 BP (i.e. 8 bits per byte / 2 bits per BP). That cuts down the data to 715 MB for the entire sequence for a single person. But, humans are quite similar genetically (something like 1% difference IIRC), so I'd imagine one could develop a fairly effective compression algorithm for such data. After compression, I'd estimate 10 MB of data per person, so about 3 petabytes would be needed to store the sequence information on every person in the US. I wouldn't call that impossible for the government. What makes such a database impossible is the fact that sequencing genomes is much too slow to be used on this scale.
Sure you can. The DVR could have a program that profiles which shows you watch and stuff, but doesn't send the data back. The program could be updated remotely, and when someone skips a commercial then it could send an anonymous notification of that. Since very little and no identifying data is sent back, there's no breach of privacy and you don't have to watch the same commercial every commercial break. Plus lowering the signal to noise ratio on advertisements for products you actually would want.
Home users having documents over a decade old probably isn't too uncommon. I'm 22 and I know that I have a few documents from my grade school days that are probably in one of these formats (I'll probably convert them to rtf now). The question is more, are most people who've used Windows for more than ten years comfortable making registry edits? (I don't know which to doubt more, human intelligence or historic Windows reliability...)
The main reason they should need a warning is because they aren't webpages. Either they get loaded through a browser plugin or they must be downloaded. In the former case, most browser plugins are slow to load, and nearly impossible to stop from loading, so a warning is nice. In the latter case they take a bit of effort to open and often people are too lazy (a warning isn't critical though). In both cases they are more inconvenient to use than HTML or text, so that's why I personally don't care for them. (IMHO, for online documents: html >= txt > rtf > pdf > jpg >> doc)
Gee, quick to accuse aren't we? But you're right that you can't post and moderate in the same discussion. That's why I posted. When you attempt to do both the system warns you of that rule, but posting takes priority over moderation. So, if you post, any moderation you've done in the discussion is removed (and you don't get the mod points back, as mentioned in the FAQ). So by posting I removed my accidental redundant mod. (I actually looked for a meaningful reply to make, but figured if I couldn't accurately click the right thing in a drop-down box, I'm probably incapable of making any intelligent or amusing contribution to the discussion tonight.)
I'd expect jammers to be a little more responsible since they are paying attention to their surroundings, unlike a rude person on a cellphone. I also doubt someone would keep jamming if there were an emergency and people were trying to call 911. (Stationary jammers would be a problem though.)
Ethics aside, there are several reasons mice & bacteria are used for research. One of the most important is lifespan. If you experimented with humans (or gorillas or elephants or something) you'd have to wait decades before some of the genetic modifications would be easy to observe. Plus the researchers would start dying of old age before the experiment could be completed.
How long is long? A few years, 10, or 50?
Well, by that logic we'd only be using technology that was developed in the 1960's. Sure, GMOs might cause some mysterious disease that we can't detect yet, but it's highly unlikely. Medical technology has advanced from the era of spraying DTT on women and children, x-raying your feet to determine your shoe size, and not realizing the link between smoking and cancer. It'll certainly improve in 10 - 50 years, and maybe we'll find something bad about GMOs, maybe not. But the average citizen from an advance industrial country can't be sustained without embracing new technology. In the case of GMOs, food prices would go up, which the poor might find troublesome. Either way, if you're scared of GMOs then, by all means, buy organic. Well, it's determined that GMOs can be labeled organic (something some people are pushing for).
Drugs help save lives, GE corn on the other hand only lines the pockets of Monsanto or whoever created the seed.
You can live with most diseases, you can't live without eating. I like my cheap hamburgers. It's probably possible to meet current production amounts without GMOs, but it'd be more expensive for the farmers. It's not like using GMOs are the only option, but they apparently are the cheapest.
Ever hear of Exxon or Union Carbide?
Well, lots of people would love to find something wrong with GMOs, and there are bound to be people looking for something. GMOs are consumed by millions of Americans everyday. (In my biotech class we're actually extracting DNA from corn chips to look for the cauliflower mosiac virus promoter, which many GMOs have, the point is that this stuff is everywhere.) It would be foolish for a company to release a dangerous product and get itself sued out of existence. Even if it somehow survived the legal onslaught, the popularity/legality of GMOs would plummet, and it'd lose it's flagship product. Tobacco companies would have been a better comparison, but they were married to a single, cancer-causing product, whereas a Biotech company can fix their product, or create a new one.
I'd rather farmers not use any herbicides or pesticides.
I like organic food, it's far better than food that lacks carbon.:-) But, jesting aside, that's great, the free market at work! I'm a poor college student so I like cheaper food myself, so long as it's tasty.
AH, but herbicides are loosing effectiveness
That seems to be just normal natural selection there. Roundup actually has held out longer than most herbicides, but if you use it enough then the weeds will become immune through their own means. Part of the problem is that GMOs are so effective and cheap (seed cost included) that farmers are using it for several consecutive years. So they naturally get Roundup-ready weeds, but that's not at all related to the usage of GMOs (i.e. it happens to all herbicides).
DO you have evidence GMOs are heavily tested? How can they be thoroughly tested when they relatively new and it could take generations to test?
I don't have any direct evidence at hand, but I also haven't encountered any evidence to the contrary either. Logically, GMOs would be first tested with animals to see if they suffer any long-term side-effects (relative to the lifespan of the animal). I couldn't imagine a responsible scientist neglecting that step, nor a cooperation fool-hardy enough to. After that it would be subject to the same tests that non-GM crops would be put through. So the relative amount of testing would be far higher. As for "it could take generations to test", I don't see why it should take any longer than a new medicine to test. And those certainly aren't tested over several generations. Plus, there are enough people opposed to GMOs that I'm sure it'd be big news if it was found that a health issue could possibly be attributed to a GMO.
This is entirely wrong. While some GMOs may cut down on the need for chemical inputs others make is easier to use those inputs.
Well, I'm not sure about absolute levels, but I'd expect they've gone down since one can now use lower amounts of stronger herbicides without killing the crops. For farmers there's an economic incentive to use as little as possible. Either way, Round-up seems to be less toxic than most herbicides. Personally, I'd much rather farmers use Round-up rather than atrazine (the most commonly used herbicide in the US). It's more toxic, a teratogen in extremely low quantities, and it can feminize frogs. It seems to be safe enough for humans (otherwise it wouldn't be used), but Round-up seems much safer.
Yet Super Weeds have been shown to be created by the cross breeding of GMO stock and wild relatives.
Weeds are highly adaptive. The main reason that farmers rotate herbicides is to slow the rate at which the weeds naturally develop resistance. But, given the fact that GMOs are limited to only a few inserted genes, the resulting GMOs aren't 100% sterile. So hybridization can happen, although the modified genes are a severe trade off (herbicide resistance, but reduced fertility). Therefore it's possible, but kinda rare. Sure, given the prominence of GMOs you'll find the modified genes in some plants that shouldn't have them, but the traits aren't rapidly spreading, otherwise Round-up and the like would lose their effectiveness. With reduced fertility I'd also expect exponential decay in the number of weeds carrying the modified genes, although I suppose new hybridizations occur every growing season. Fortunately, the artificial corn chromosome should help alleviate that problem in corn. With a large number of sterility-causing genes embedded on the chromosome (not for the research version obviously, but added to the final product), it should be possible to reduce hybridization to an effectively impossible event. But, in any case, it's not like we'd be breathing "clouds of genetically engineered pollen", the GMOs are almost entirely sterile.
One argument for GMOs is that they are very heavily tested, far more so than the other stuff you eat (it also allows farmers to use less weed/pest killers, most of which are known to be harmful for humans). In any case, I doubt that the widely grown crops will be making any pollen. Most GMOs are designed to be sterile. First of all, this is good for the biotech company since farmers have to buy seed from them every year. But, besides being good for the business model, it's also a safeguard. Plants can hybridize very easily, and reproduce very quickly. You don't want some random species to acquire the modifications, nor do you want natural selection working with the modifications. In the case of the farmers, they don't want the surrounding weeds to acquire the herbicide-resistance gene from their crops. Plus, AFAIK, other than causing allergies, pollen is pretty much harmless.
It probably is, I just took it from a handout from one of my classes. Different CFCs are probably different in this regard as well. Of course, it might also be possible to determine the figure to that level of accuracy. Even the spectrometers in high school reported three (wildly inaccurate) significant figures.
I agree with you, but banning CFCs is a good thing as far as greenhouse gases are concerned. One ton of CFCs is equivalent to 5,897 tons of CO2 as far as that's concerned. Unfortunately, the HFCs that we used to replace them are equivalent to 10,614 tons of CO2, although they aren't quite as bad in regards to ozone depletion (still not good though).
Interesting, while I do agree the tazering shouldn't have happened, I don't really feel any sympathy for the kid. He set out to be malicious and resisted the police, plus I can't see what he was trying to accomplish. As for this case, this guy didn't do anything illegal, but refused to let the police and circuit city break the law. Maybe it's just me, but I care a lot more about the permanent loss of "unimportant civil" liberties than someone suffering unnecessary but temporary pain.
Assuming that affirmative action does indeed make things fairer, what keeps the effects from accumulating? All levels of education that I've encountered use some form of affirmative action. So, for a researcher, a typical route might be: private high school, college, graduate/professional school, research grant. If you give caucasian males a 10% affirmative action disadvantage at every step, the final disadvantage would be 35%, which makes things unfair again. Even with just college and graduate/professional school the disadvantage is nearly twice that which was intended. While I personally don't like any kind of affirmative action, I can understand why it exists at the college level. At anything beyond that (like research grants) and you're just hurting someone who's already at a disadvantage.
Well, a quick check of Circuit City's website reveals that Joe Six-pack probably pays about $30 for a USB cable right now. The new cables are probably going to be ludicrously expensive. Or perhaps the price will stay at $30 since I'd think people would catch on to the scam when a USB cable costs more than their printer...
Slashdot Mirror
So you're ok with child porn then ? Or your bank details appearing on the web ?
Yep, because I care about police finding child porn so they can arrest the child abusers more than I care about making it difficult for pedophiles to masturbate. My financial security also shouldn't depend on the secrecy of a number, but censorship won't help if the number is exposed. I.e. it'd be neigh impossible to automatically sensor that information, and even if it's taken down quickly, you'd still need to move your (remaining) money elsewhere.
You seem to be confusing free speech with censorship. You are entitled to write/say anything you like, but no-one is forced to read/listen.
Censorship prevents free speech. It prevents people from having a choice to listen. Causing immediate harm is one thing, but teaching/telling people unfavorable things is quite another. Going on about how muslims are the scourge of the world is distasteful, and I'd hope people would choose to ignore it or argue with it, but it doesn't actually cause anybody harm.
It seems like economics would push businesses to spend a bit more to make "a very small number of people happy". Say that small number is .5% of internet users. There are ~1.5 billion internet users, so .5% is 7.5 million (~1.5 million if you just care about your continent). Why wouldn't you want a monopoly on those users if your competitors are choosing to ignore them?
.6% of people are blind, >2% have visual impairment, color blindness is fairly common (~7% of males), as is the inability to purchase a fast internet connection or an up-to-date computer due to geographic or financial reasons.
Besides, it's not always a choice for people.
It's not good to make assumptions about things not existing. Windows 97 was a version of 95 OSR 2 that was modified, rebranded, and pirated. The boot screen and wallpaper stated that name, as did the install disc. I'm also fairly certain I saw it in a US store once, hence the reason I remember it existed. Sure, checking out "System Properties" would reveal what it really was, but I'd hardly expect most end-users to know how to access that dialog. Just be glad they didn't install IE 4.7 while they were at it. =P
It doesn't seem to be just politics/sports, but I haven't had much success with getting it to accurately clump other things.
C++: Failed to get any results (mostly a test to see if "++" threw it off)
Perl: Expected: love it/hate it type clumping; Got: News articles mentioning perl, Ubuntu news, and lots of unclumped results
Anime: Expected: love it/hate it and blogs about the new series (i.e. current news); Got: Mostly unclumped "animal" type articles
Haiku: Expected: a couple articles about poetry, some about the OS, mostly a test of sorting ability and database size; Got: A few relevant results, but no useful clumping
So, yeah. A neat idea, but not terribly useful for stuff other than politics/sports right now. Or perhaps it's been tweaked for mainstream stuff.
IMHO we should go back to publicly displaying the entire legal code on a monument. In theory it'd encourage lawmakers to make the law concise and understandable. I highly doubt that would happen in practice, but at least we would have a space elevator.
AFAIK it's coastal China that does most of the polluting. A quick googling suggests that the population of coastal China is somewhere around twice that of the US, so per capita the US is still worse, but the difference isn't as dramatic. Of course, one could further divide the US and China into major industrial zones and calculate their per capita pollution, so IMHO it's better to look at the benefit provided. The US does get cheap goods, so there's some of the benefit, but China gets money and I'm not familiar enough with their economic situation to say how well that's distributed. It could be that the US's pollution benefits nearly the entire US population whereas China's only benefits an elite few. Or it could be that China's pollution is helping to raise the standard of living of all 1.2 billion Chinese citizens. In any case I think anyone would agree that both China and the US both need to focus more on polluting less rather than figuring out who's the worse polluter.
A quick bit of Googling suggests that modern SSDs are limited to about 1 - 5 million write cycles. Assuming a 32 GB drive with a write speed of 100 MB/sec it would take at least 10 years of continuous writing to hit that limit.
32 GB / 100 MB / sec = 320 sec = 5.33 min
5.33 min / cycle * 1,000,000 cycles = 10.14 years
Also, I've heard that when flash drives fail they simply become read-only. Anyone know if that's true?
Maintaining muscle mass is a significant energy expenditure, about 50 calories per pound of muscle per day. For comparison, running for half an hour burns about 350 calories. It's certainly possible to lose fat through aerobic workouts alone, but it's not as efficient as doing a mixture of aerobic and anaerobic workouts.
Since the US and England differ in more ways than just the gun ban, wouldn't it make more sense to compare England's crime rates before and after the 1997 ban?
First charts I could find:
http://www.crimestatistics.org.uk/output/Page40.asp http://www.crimestatistics.org.uk/output/Page63.asp
I'm certainly no expert, but it looks like homicide increased dramatically until 2002, where it has slowly dropped off until it reached pre-gun-ban levels. Violent crime is a bit more ambiguous, since it peaked in 1995 and was already declining. According to the BBC handgun violence rose 40% in the two years following the ban.
Storing all that data would require absolutely immense processing and storage capabilities which simply don't exist.
It is a lot of data, but I wouldn't discount the possibility of storing it. The nuclear human genome is something like 3 billion base pairs. That's 2.8 GB per person. But, each base pair has only 4 possibilities, so each byte could store 4 BP (i.e. 8 bits per byte / 2 bits per BP). That cuts down the data to 715 MB for the entire sequence for a single person. But, humans are quite similar genetically (something like 1% difference IIRC), so I'd imagine one could develop a fairly effective compression algorithm for such data. After compression, I'd estimate 10 MB of data per person, so about 3 petabytes would be needed to store the sequence information on every person in the US. I wouldn't call that impossible for the government. What makes such a database impossible is the fact that sequencing genomes is much too slow to be used on this scale.
Sure you can. The DVR could have a program that profiles which shows you watch and stuff, but doesn't send the data back. The program could be updated remotely, and when someone skips a commercial then it could send an anonymous notification of that. Since very little and no identifying data is sent back, there's no breach of privacy and you don't have to watch the same commercial every commercial break. Plus lowering the signal to noise ratio on advertisements for products you actually would want.
Home users having documents over a decade old probably isn't too uncommon. I'm 22 and I know that I have a few documents from my grade school days that are probably in one of these formats (I'll probably convert them to rtf now). The question is more, are most people who've used Windows for more than ten years comfortable making registry edits? (I don't know which to doubt more, human intelligence or historic Windows reliability...)
The main reason they should need a warning is because they aren't webpages. Either they get loaded through a browser plugin or they must be downloaded. In the former case, most browser plugins are slow to load, and nearly impossible to stop from loading, so a warning is nice. In the latter case they take a bit of effort to open and often people are too lazy (a warning isn't critical though). In both cases they are more inconvenient to use than HTML or text, so that's why I personally don't care for them. (IMHO, for online documents: html >= txt > rtf > pdf > jpg >> doc)
Gee, quick to accuse aren't we? But you're right that you can't post and moderate in the same discussion. That's why I posted. When you attempt to do both the system warns you of that rule, but posting takes priority over moderation. So, if you post, any moderation you've done in the discussion is removed (and you don't get the mod points back, as mentioned in the FAQ). So by posting I removed my accidental redundant mod. (I actually looked for a meaningful reply to make, but figured if I couldn't accurately click the right thing in a drop-down box, I'm probably incapable of making any intelligent or amusing contribution to the discussion tonight.)
Oops, I accidentally clicked "Redundant" instead of insightful, sorry about that (and replying to get rid of it).
I'd expect jammers to be a little more responsible since they are paying attention to their surroundings, unlike a rude person on a cellphone. I also doubt someone would keep jamming if there were an emergency and people were trying to call 911. (Stationary jammers would be a problem though.)
Ethics aside, there are several reasons mice & bacteria are used for research. One of the most important is lifespan. If you experimented with humans (or gorillas or elephants or something) you'd have to wait decades before some of the genetic modifications would be easy to observe. Plus the researchers would start dying of old age before the experiment could be completed.
How long is long? A few years, 10, or 50?
:-) But, jesting aside, that's great, the free market at work! I'm a poor college student so I like cheaper food myself, so long as it's tasty.
Well, by that logic we'd only be using technology that was developed in the 1960's. Sure, GMOs might cause some mysterious disease that we can't detect yet, but it's highly unlikely. Medical technology has advanced from the era of spraying DTT on women and children, x-raying your feet to determine your shoe size, and not realizing the link between smoking and cancer. It'll certainly improve in 10 - 50 years, and maybe we'll find something bad about GMOs, maybe not. But the average citizen from an advance industrial country can't be sustained without embracing new technology. In the case of GMOs, food prices would go up, which the poor might find troublesome. Either way, if you're scared of GMOs then, by all means, buy organic. Well, it's determined that GMOs can be labeled organic (something some people are pushing for).
Drugs help save lives, GE corn on the other hand only lines the pockets of Monsanto or whoever created the seed.
You can live with most diseases, you can't live without eating. I like my cheap hamburgers. It's probably possible to meet current production amounts without GMOs, but it'd be more expensive for the farmers. It's not like using GMOs are the only option, but they apparently are the cheapest.
Ever hear of Exxon or Union Carbide?
Well, lots of people would love to find something wrong with GMOs, and there are bound to be people looking for something. GMOs are consumed by millions of Americans everyday. (In my biotech class we're actually extracting DNA from corn chips to look for the cauliflower mosiac virus promoter, which many GMOs have, the point is that this stuff is everywhere.) It would be foolish for a company to release a dangerous product and get itself sued out of existence. Even if it somehow survived the legal onslaught, the popularity/legality of GMOs would plummet, and it'd lose it's flagship product. Tobacco companies would have been a better comparison, but they were married to a single, cancer-causing product, whereas a Biotech company can fix their product, or create a new one.
I'd rather farmers not use any herbicides or pesticides.
I like organic food, it's far better than food that lacks carbon.
AH, but herbicides are loosing effectiveness
That seems to be just normal natural selection there. Roundup actually has held out longer than most herbicides, but if you use it enough then the weeds will become immune through their own means. Part of the problem is that GMOs are so effective and cheap (seed cost included) that farmers are using it for several consecutive years. So they naturally get Roundup-ready weeds, but that's not at all related to the usage of GMOs (i.e. it happens to all herbicides).
DO you have evidence GMOs are heavily tested? How can they be thoroughly tested when they relatively new and it could take generations to test?
I don't have any direct evidence at hand, but I also haven't encountered any evidence to the contrary either. Logically, GMOs would be first tested with animals to see if they suffer any long-term side-effects (relative to the lifespan of the animal). I couldn't imagine a responsible scientist neglecting that step, nor a cooperation fool-hardy enough to. After that it would be subject to the same tests that non-GM crops would be put through. So the relative amount of testing would be far higher. As for "it could take generations to test", I don't see why it should take any longer than a new medicine to test. And those certainly aren't tested over several generations. Plus, there are enough people opposed to GMOs that I'm sure it'd be big news if it was found that a health issue could possibly be attributed to a GMO.
This is entirely wrong. While some GMOs may cut down on the need for chemical inputs others make is easier to use those inputs.
Well, I'm not sure about absolute levels, but I'd expect they've gone down since one can now use lower amounts of stronger herbicides without killing the crops. For farmers there's an economic incentive to use as little as possible. Either way, Round-up seems to be less toxic than most herbicides. Personally, I'd much rather farmers use Round-up rather than atrazine (the most commonly used herbicide in the US). It's more toxic, a teratogen in extremely low quantities, and it can feminize frogs. It seems to be safe enough for humans (otherwise it wouldn't be used), but Round-up seems much safer.
Yet Super Weeds have been shown to be created by the cross breeding of GMO stock and wild relatives.
Weeds are highly adaptive. The main reason that farmers rotate herbicides is to slow the rate at which the weeds naturally develop resistance. But, given the fact that GMOs are limited to only a few inserted genes, the resulting GMOs aren't 100% sterile. So hybridization can happen, although the modified genes are a severe trade off (herbicide resistance, but reduced fertility). Therefore it's possible, but kinda rare. Sure, given the prominence of GMOs you'll find the modified genes in some plants that shouldn't have them, but the traits aren't rapidly spreading, otherwise Round-up and the like would lose their effectiveness. With reduced fertility I'd also expect exponential decay in the number of weeds carrying the modified genes, although I suppose new hybridizations occur every growing season. Fortunately, the artificial corn chromosome should help alleviate that problem in corn. With a large number of sterility-causing genes embedded on the chromosome (not for the research version obviously, but added to the final product), it should be possible to reduce hybridization to an effectively impossible event. But, in any case, it's not like we'd be breathing "clouds of genetically engineered pollen", the GMOs are almost entirely sterile.
One argument for GMOs is that they are very heavily tested, far more so than the other stuff you eat (it also allows farmers to use less weed/pest killers, most of which are known to be harmful for humans). In any case, I doubt that the widely grown crops will be making any pollen. Most GMOs are designed to be sterile. First of all, this is good for the biotech company since farmers have to buy seed from them every year. But, besides being good for the business model, it's also a safeguard. Plants can hybridize very easily, and reproduce very quickly. You don't want some random species to acquire the modifications, nor do you want natural selection working with the modifications. In the case of the farmers, they don't want the surrounding weeds to acquire the herbicide-resistance gene from their crops. Plus, AFAIK, other than causing allergies, pollen is pretty much harmless.
It probably is, I just took it from a handout from one of my classes. Different CFCs are probably different in this regard as well. Of course, it might also be possible to determine the figure to that level of accuracy. Even the spectrometers in high school reported three (wildly inaccurate) significant figures.
I agree with you, but banning CFCs is a good thing as far as greenhouse gases are concerned. One ton of CFCs is equivalent to 5,897 tons of CO2 as far as that's concerned. Unfortunately, the HFCs that we used to replace them are equivalent to 10,614 tons of CO2, although they aren't quite as bad in regards to ozone depletion (still not good though).
Interesting, while I do agree the tazering shouldn't have happened, I don't really feel any sympathy for the kid. He set out to be malicious and resisted the police, plus I can't see what he was trying to accomplish. As for this case, this guy didn't do anything illegal, but refused to let the police and circuit city break the law. Maybe it's just me, but I care a lot more about the permanent loss of "unimportant civil" liberties than someone suffering unnecessary but temporary pain.
Assuming that affirmative action does indeed make things fairer, what keeps the effects from accumulating? All levels of education that I've encountered use some form of affirmative action. So, for a researcher, a typical route might be: private high school, college, graduate/professional school, research grant. If you give caucasian males a 10% affirmative action disadvantage at every step, the final disadvantage would be 35%, which makes things unfair again. Even with just college and graduate/professional school the disadvantage is nearly twice that which was intended. While I personally don't like any kind of affirmative action, I can understand why it exists at the college level. At anything beyond that (like research grants) and you're just hurting someone who's already at a disadvantage.
Well, a quick check of Circuit City's website reveals that Joe Six-pack probably pays about $30 for a USB cable right now. The new cables are probably going to be ludicrously expensive. Or perhaps the price will stay at $30 since I'd think people would catch on to the scam when a USB cable costs more than their printer...