In case of human IQ, the evolution feedback works in the wrong direction. Generally, the more intelligent, well-educated and well-established couples get children at a later age, and get fewer of them. The "dumber" and lower-class people reproduce faster, and there will be more and more of them.
This effect is clearly visible both on a global scale (developed/developing countries) and locally (lower/upper class).
This is unlikely to be anything new. Very intelligent people have a tendency to get distracted into doing other things that distract from their "real" business (evolutionarily speaking) of increasing the representation of their genes in the gene pool. On the other hand, intelligence can benefit survival, so while the number of offspring may be smaller, they may survive longer, compensating for their lower average fertility.
So we may already be pretty close to steady state insofar as evolution of intelligence is concerned. The notion that there is some kind of evolutionary driving force toward ever-greater intelligence is probably wrong, but fears about degradation of the gene pool because of less intelligent people having more children are probably also misguided.
Whether it would be a good thing for us to get smarter is another question entirely. And one that we will have to answer eventually, because genetic studies will inevitably lead eventually to identification of genes that limit intelligence, making it possible for parents to control, at least to some extent, the intelligence of their children.
It doesn't make it particularly more valuable than the smartphones with 3G and that third party apps like Opera's web browser can be installed on.
And you're wrong in your first position. There are a LOT of Apple Fashionistas who buy Apple because they are Apple enthusiasts.
It will to people who prefer Apple's interface design to that of other smartphones. And this is where you have it wrong. You dismiss people as "Apple fashionistas" merely because their personal tastes in interface design happen to differ from your own. People who like lots of little buttons will continue to buy traditional smartphones. Those who don't will gravitate to the iPhone (and if history is any guide, its many imitators).
In iTunes and on my iPod, I have gigabytes of music, none of it with DRM. Apple certainly did not have the obligation to support the ability to add unprotected mp3's to iTunes. They could easily have restricted iTunes to ripping to a protected format, or automatically wrapped all songs added to iTunes in a DRM format. Apple seems to have adopted the least restrictive DRM that the recording industry will accept, and has even built in a method for defeating DRM (write to CD, rip to mp3) that is satisfactory to the typical user who listens to music on iPod, computer, or boom box (although not to audiophiles). Apple makes its money off of iPod sales, not music sales, so the only real benefit that Apple reaps from DRM is convincing recording companies to release their music to the iTunes Store. Apple clearly doesn't want to share the benefit of access to the iTunes Store with other music player manufacturers, but that restriction is not really dependent upon song DRM; it could just as well be built into the iTunes Store and iPod software, at least to the point of making use for other players inconvenient.
So if the music industry decides that an unprotected format is OK, I imagine that Apple would be delighted. On the other hand, Apple is clearly committed to standardization--all songs in the same format, at the same price, with the same restrictions. So I'd be surprised if Apple would be willing to adopt a patchwork approach in which some songs have DRM and some do not.
So your position is that the true-rainbow (couldn't say true-blue because Apple isn't even working with IBM any longer) Apple enthusiast is going to carry around an iPhone and an 80g iPod?
I don't think much of anybody buys a product because they are "Apple enthusiasts"--Apple's products sell because they offer features that cause many people to perceive them as best in class. But people are still only going to buy the products that offer the features that they expect to use. For example, I like to listen to music pretty much exclusively in shuffle mode, frequently have opportunities to sync with my computer, and I'm only rarely in circumstances where I'd like to watch a video on a small portable screen. So the high-end iPod seems to be a great product, but its additional features over the nano or iPhone are not ones that I'd use much. Somebody who wants to keep all of their music on their mp3 player and often wants to watch videos while traveling is a candidate for a hard disk based iPod. They would probably buy an iPhone as well only if its non-music features such as its web browsing, wifi, random access voice mail, advanced touch interface etc. make it more valuable to them than a generic cell phone.
To really match the high end iPod, they'd have had to include a hard disk, which would be inconsistent with the battery life required for a phone. If you want the features of a high-end iPod, you'll need to buy an iPod. So the only real cannibilization is with the nano. But who cares, the nano is cheap, while the iPhone reportedly has a big margin. So if people choose to buy an iPhone instead of a nano, Apple's bottom line will benefit.
I don't agree that this gives the power to Cisco in the negotiations. Even if Apple can't get the rights, either in court or in a reasonable deal with Cisco, they could simply change the name to ApplePhone just before release, exactly as they did with iTV...I mean, AppleTV. And even if they change the name, everybody will keep calling it iPhone, anyway.
I was in the market for a new phone, but decided to delay a decision until I heard whether Apple announced anything. If Apple hadn't announced, I was ready to buy another model. Now I'm waiting for iPhone.
My biggest peeve is the display. OSX uses a font-smoothing technology that to me makes the text look fuzzy. I've argued with people on IRC channels over it, and I must admit that it's technically superior and produces a better match with what's eventually going to come out of the printer, but the fact is if I'm reading text off the monitor 8-12 hours per day I want it to be less fuzzy, accurate or not.
Go to the "Appearance" control panel. Set Font Smoothing to "Light." Set the minimum font size for smoothing to "12." If that isn't good enough, there is a 3rd party freeware program called "Antialiasing (BLAST)" that will let you turn it off entirely.
Something else I don't like is the inability to easily see how many windows are open for each app. Yes, I know about the F9/F10/F11 tricks, but it'd be nice to have a few ticks next to the icon for running apps rather than a single tick showing it's running.
Right-click the icon in the dock to get a list of open windows. You can select the one that you want.
Some very early versions of OS X often had problems with permissions getting screwed up, usually by software installing itself improperly. It's quick and easy to repair permissions, so many people routinely repair permissions whenever there's any sort of a problem. However, actual problems with permissions have been rare for quite some time. I can't remember when I last saw anything fixed by a permissions repair.
Re:Not impressed
on
iPhone Roundup
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This is not so terrible as the HORRIBLE AND STUPIDLY DESIGNED Mighty(???) Mouse, but almost.... Anyway, people will buy it.
I'm glad that you put in the comment on the Mighty Mouse, because it gives me a good index on how much to trust your opinion. I really love my MIghty Mouse. I gave up a wireless 3-button scroll Mouse for the initial Mighty Mouse, just because it was so comfortable and so much easier to use, seeming to magically know what I wanted to do, that it was worth the inconvenience of going back to the wire. Now of course, I have the wireless version. These days, it drives me nuts when I have to use an old-style scroll mouse.
Re:The plan will make or break the iPhone
on
iPhone Roundup
·
· Score: 1
Most anyone that is interested in the iPhone will already have a cellphone and be locked in to a 2 year contract already.
I've specifically refrained from updating my cell phone and entering into a new contract while waiting to see what Apple comes with. Now I'm glad that I did. I suspect that I'm not along, and that there could be a significant amount of pent-up demand.
Every year there are a number of these--compounds that kill cancer cells in a dish, or maybe shrink tumors in an animal model, that are touted in the press as the cure for cancer. And most of them are never heard from again. Sometimes they are just too toxic in man. Or they work in just a tiny subset of patients. Or they make you horribly ill and add only a few weeks onto your survival time. It turns out that killing cancer cells in a dish, or even reducing tumor size in an animal, just isn't all that predictive of efficacy in man. That doesn't mean that every such lead isn't worth pursuing, but it's important to keep a sense of perspective.
Now, something that you probably don't know, is that when he was in jail, he got beaten severely because he refused to tell the mob how to make blue boxes. He has severe back problems to this day because of it. That's hardly the choice that would be made by someone who thinks none of the rules apply to him.
It's the kind of choice that would be made by somebody who believes in principles rather than rules.
I suppose that might be an argument IF...
on
iPhone Not Running OS X
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Darwin, the BSD based operating system that underlies what Apple has previously been calling OS X, does not run on ARM processors. The Darwin / Apple Public Source licensing agreement says the source would have to be made available if it is modified and sold (paraphrased; read it yourself).
I suppose that might be an argument IF Apple were currently selling the iPhone. But they are not. So assuming that the iPhone runs a version of OS X as Apple has said (and there is no reason to doubt it), Apple still has several months to meet the terms of the agreement.
The notion that porn was available only on VHS is entirely myth. I lived in New York City during the height of the VHS/Beta wars. At that time, VHS had only a modest lead. Video stores had large beta and VHS departments (these were video sales stores; rental stores did not become common until later on). And both the beta and VHS departments had substantial porn sections. Videos, no matter what the rating, were quite expensive, selling for close to $100 (which was real money in those days)
Sony had chosen to go after the high-end market, a practice that had been successful with other items in their audio and video equipment line. Sony imagined that VCRs would be used mostly for TV time-shifting, with sales of modest numbers of (expensive) prerecorded videos to enthusiasts. Sony players tended to be the videophile favorite, because they usually got the hot new features such as stable still display and hifi sound a bit earlier, with VHS catching up a few months later. The cheaper VHS machines sold to the more budget-conscious buyers. What Sony failed to anticipate was the emergence of rental outlets as a major market force. The first rental stores that I saw carried both beta and VHS (and yes, all ratings in both formats). But since the cheaper VHS machines were a bit more common, they stocked VHS a bit more heavily. Consumers noted this that the rental selection was better for VHS, and began favor VHS machines even more heavily. In response, to the increased demand for VHS tapes, the rental outlets cut back still further on beta to favor VHS. Within a couple of years after rental outlets became common, I began to see stores eliminating their beta departments. Around that time, Sony dropped the price of beta VCRs to make them competitive with VHS, but by then it was too late for Sony to catch up.
Actually, I think that Apple is in a pretty good position. They can say to Cisco, "Either license us the name at a reasonable price, or we'll change the name just before introduction, just like we did with iTV--I mean AppleTV. Everybody will call it iPhone, anyway."
Also no removable/expandable media, no mention about the battery access (probably sealed), no mention about compatibility with existing iPod interface (such as docks, car connectors, etc.)
The pictures show what is labeled as an "iPod Connector," looking just like the port on current iPods.
Once I read in a little further, I lost most of my interest in this as a smartphone. There's no HSDPA, no hardware keyboard (the software one looks terrible)
However, it has bluetooth, raising the question of whether it will work with a bluetooth keyboard
More likely, the iPhone voice. Fits entirely into the headset. You program your call list from your computer and ask for them by name. If you want to call somebody else, you have to read off the digits.
Most folks have 2 year contracts and at any given time half of them are less than 1 year in.
On the other hand, there may be some pent-up demand. The main reason that I haven't bought a new cell-phone was fear (justified, I now see) that I would be kicking myself if I was locked into a contract when Apple finally came out with one.
The bad news is that I was hoping to get away from Cingular.
We've never sailed a ship this big in the North Atlantic before. Are you sure it's unsinkable? Wouldn't it be prudent to have a full compliment of lifeboats just in case it isn't? Are you sure we can manage hydrogen in our airships? It hasn't been this cold during a shuttle launch before. We'd better check with the engineers, and if they say not to launch, we ought to listen.
All of which were well understood, predictable risks, that could be dealt with by simple, logical safeguards. But this is more along the lines of "What if such a big ship attracts a giant squid from deep undersea that drags everybody down to a watery grave?"
Finally, AFAIK prions are proteins with the same basic chemistry (same exact number of atoms and linkages between atoms) as their healthy counterparts, but folded differently. Thus, "a protein folded properly is a protein folded properly". Maintaining things like that across generations of cloned copies? Do we really want to stake our lives on it? Cloned monoculture meat? Very serious issues. It's one thing when I, as a programmer, crash somebody's box. It's quite another to crash the food supply. I think we should be a lot more cautious with this stuff. We have redundant power supplies in those servers. Where's our redundantn food supply? If somebody's going to experiment with my food, I want a backup.
Yes, in principle, it may be just barely possible that cloning could result in a mutation that causes overproduction of a protein with no noticeable ill effects in the animal, yet survives proteolytic conditions in the stomach and digestive tract, and results in a rare neurodegenerative disease in humans.
Of course, none of this really has anything to do with cloning, which is not particularly prone to produce mutations. Such a mutation could just as well occur spontaneously and be propagated by selective breeding. For that matter, it may have already happened. Such a mutation might be naturally present in any food that we are already eating. There are a number of rare neurodegenerative diseases. It is certainly possible that some of them are due to a protein that is present in wheat or potatoes or corn (all of which have limited genetic variability). If you are really paranoid about this sort of thing, you could avoid eating any food with low genetic variability.
But wait! Who knows how big a dose of the deadly protein it takes to induce the disease? Maybe it takes only a single dose! It is certainly theoretically possible. In that case, eating foods with high genetic variability is precisely the worst thing you can do, because it would increase your risk of exposure to the deadly protein! To be safest, you should be eating only cloned foods and other foods with low genetic variability!
Of course, hardly anybody is going to worry much about the possibility that there might be a harmful prion in the foods that they already eat. It may be a theoretical possibility, but next to other food related risks, such as heart disease and food-borne infections, it is fairly obvious that prions in the diet (which in the worst known case cause human disease only very rarely) are far, far down on the worry list. But tie it to a new technology, and suddenly it is seen as horribly plausible. Fundamentally, however, it is merely another rationalization for fear of change--an unreasoning paranoia about anything that is new and different.
I said I had read up on Monsanto, I didn't say I had read every single one of their patents or was a Monsanto expert.
If you have a specific question, you look it up. I'm not your secretary or librarian. After watching the documentary I looked into what I was interested in. You are welcome to do the same.
I merely asked you for just one single example to support your own claim that
The vast majority of crop patents held by Monsanto are on crops that they didn't breed, modify, grow, change, etc.
They patented them because they could and because no one had.
One would think that if this is true for the "vast majority" of crop patents held by Monsanto fit this description, that you would be able to come up with just one example in no time. You are the one who made the claim, so it is your obligation to support it. Frankly, it sounds like bull to me, and the little bit of reading that I've done supports that impression. I'm not going to bother doing extensive research to disprove obvious nonsense if you are too lazy to support your own claims.
The documentary "The Future of Food" is a great place to start.
So if you've researched the issue, why are you seemingly unable to answer my rather simple question:
What pre-existing crop variety has been patented by Monsanto without any form of modification by genetic engineering, selective breeding, or hybridization?
There is plenty other information on the net about Monsanto and their practices.
This link certainly doesn't support your claims. It describes how Monsanto lost a European patent when it was unable to demonstrate that the baking qualities of a wheat variety were the result of their genetic modification. This hardly supports your claim that the patent office is allowing Monsanto to patent pre-existing plant varieties simply because nobody else had done so.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, for me, hybrid players will end the format war...
Oh, yeah, and a player price under $150.
This is unlikely to be anything new. Very intelligent people have a tendency to get distracted into doing other things that distract from their "real" business (evolutionarily speaking) of increasing the representation of their genes in the gene pool. On the other hand, intelligence can benefit survival, so while the number of offspring may be smaller, they may survive longer, compensating for their lower average fertility.
So we may already be pretty close to steady state insofar as evolution of intelligence is concerned. The notion that there is some kind of evolutionary driving force toward ever-greater intelligence is probably wrong, but fears about degradation of the gene pool because of less intelligent people having more children are probably also misguided.
Whether it would be a good thing for us to get smarter is another question entirely. And one that we will have to answer eventually, because genetic studies will inevitably lead eventually to identification of genes that limit intelligence, making it possible for parents to control, at least to some extent, the intelligence of their children.
It will to people who prefer Apple's interface design to that of other smartphones. And this is where you have it wrong. You dismiss people as "Apple fashionistas" merely because their personal tastes in interface design happen to differ from your own. People who like lots of little buttons will continue to buy traditional smartphones. Those who don't will gravitate to the iPhone (and if history is any guide, its many imitators).
In iTunes and on my iPod, I have gigabytes of music, none of it with DRM. Apple certainly did not have the obligation to support the ability to add unprotected mp3's to iTunes. They could easily have restricted iTunes to ripping to a protected format, or automatically wrapped all songs added to iTunes in a DRM format. Apple seems to have adopted the least restrictive DRM that the recording industry will accept, and has even built in a method for defeating DRM (write to CD, rip to mp3) that is satisfactory to the typical user who listens to music on iPod, computer, or boom box (although not to audiophiles). Apple makes its money off of iPod sales, not music sales, so the only real benefit that Apple reaps from DRM is convincing recording companies to release their music to the iTunes Store. Apple clearly doesn't want to share the benefit of access to the iTunes Store with other music player manufacturers, but that restriction is not really dependent upon song DRM; it could just as well be built into the iTunes Store and iPod software, at least to the point of making use for other players inconvenient.
So if the music industry decides that an unprotected format is OK, I imagine that Apple would be delighted. On the other hand, Apple is clearly committed to standardization--all songs in the same format, at the same price, with the same restrictions. So I'd be surprised if Apple would be willing to adopt a patchwork approach in which some songs have DRM and some do not.
I don't think much of anybody buys a product because they are "Apple enthusiasts"--Apple's products sell because they offer features that cause many people to perceive them as best in class. But people are still only going to buy the products that offer the features that they expect to use. For example, I like to listen to music pretty much exclusively in shuffle mode, frequently have opportunities to sync with my computer, and I'm only rarely in circumstances where I'd like to watch a video on a small portable screen. So the high-end iPod seems to be a great product, but its additional features over the nano or iPhone are not ones that I'd use much. Somebody who wants to keep all of their music on their mp3 player and often wants to watch videos while traveling is a candidate for a hard disk based iPod. They would probably buy an iPhone as well only if its non-music features such as its web browsing, wifi, random access voice mail, advanced touch interface etc. make it more valuable to them than a generic cell phone.
To really match the high end iPod, they'd have had to include a hard disk, which would be inconsistent with the battery life required for a phone. If you want the features of a high-end iPod, you'll need to buy an iPod. So the only real cannibilization is with the nano. But who cares, the nano is cheap, while the iPhone reportedly has a big margin. So if people choose to buy an iPhone instead of a nano, Apple's bottom line will benefit.
I don't agree that this gives the power to Cisco in the negotiations. Even if Apple can't get the rights, either in court or in a reasonable deal with Cisco, they could simply change the name to ApplePhone just before release, exactly as they did with iTV...I mean, AppleTV. And even if they change the name, everybody will keep calling it iPhone, anyway.
I was in the market for a new phone, but decided to delay a decision until I heard whether Apple announced anything. If Apple hadn't announced, I was ready to buy another model. Now I'm waiting for iPhone.
Go to the "Appearance" control panel. Set Font Smoothing to "Light." Set the minimum font size for smoothing to "12." If that isn't good enough, there is a 3rd party freeware program called "Antialiasing (BLAST)" that will let you turn it off entirely.
Right-click the icon in the dock to get a list of open windows. You can select the one that you want.
Some very early versions of OS X often had problems with permissions getting screwed up, usually by software installing itself improperly. It's quick and easy to repair permissions, so many people routinely repair permissions whenever there's any sort of a problem. However, actual problems with permissions have been rare for quite some time. I can't remember when I last saw anything fixed by a permissions repair.
I'm glad that you put in the comment on the Mighty Mouse, because it gives me a good index on how much to trust your opinion. I really love my MIghty Mouse. I gave up a wireless 3-button scroll Mouse for the initial Mighty Mouse, just because it was so comfortable and so much easier to use, seeming to magically know what I wanted to do, that it was worth the inconvenience of going back to the wire. Now of course, I have the wireless version. These days, it drives me nuts when I have to use an old-style scroll mouse.
Most anyone that is interested in the iPhone will already have a cellphone and be locked in to a 2 year contract already.
I've specifically refrained from updating my cell phone and entering into a new contract while waiting to see what Apple comes with. Now I'm glad that I did. I suspect that I'm not along, and that there could be a significant amount of pent-up demand.
Every year there are a number of these--compounds that kill cancer cells in a dish, or maybe shrink tumors in an animal model, that are touted in the press as the cure for cancer. And most of them are never heard from again. Sometimes they are just too toxic in man. Or they work in just a tiny subset of patients. Or they make you horribly ill and add only a few weeks onto your survival time. It turns out that killing cancer cells in a dish, or even reducing tumor size in an animal, just isn't all that predictive of efficacy in man. That doesn't mean that every such lead isn't worth pursuing, but it's important to keep a sense of perspective.
Now, something that you probably don't know, is that when he was in jail, he got beaten severely because he refused to tell the mob how to make blue boxes. He has severe back problems to this day because of it. That's hardly the choice that would be made by someone who thinks none of the rules apply to him.
It's the kind of choice that would be made by somebody who believes in principles rather than rules.
I suppose that might be an argument IF Apple were currently selling the iPhone. But they are not. So assuming that the iPhone runs a version of OS X as Apple has said (and there is no reason to doubt it), Apple still has several months to meet the terms of the agreement.
The notion that porn was available only on VHS is entirely myth. I lived in New York City during the height of the VHS/Beta wars. At that time, VHS had only a modest lead. Video stores had large beta and VHS departments (these were video sales stores; rental stores did not become common until later on). And both the beta and VHS departments had substantial porn sections. Videos, no matter what the rating, were quite expensive, selling for close to $100 (which was real money in those days)
Sony had chosen to go after the high-end market, a practice that had been successful with other items in their audio and video equipment line. Sony imagined that VCRs would be used mostly for TV time-shifting, with sales of modest numbers of (expensive) prerecorded videos to enthusiasts. Sony players tended to be the videophile favorite, because they usually got the hot new features such as stable still display and hifi sound a bit earlier, with VHS catching up a few months later. The cheaper VHS machines sold to the more budget-conscious buyers. What Sony failed to anticipate was the emergence of rental outlets as a major market force. The first rental stores that I saw carried both beta and VHS (and yes, all ratings in both formats). But since the cheaper VHS machines were a bit more common, they stocked VHS a bit more heavily. Consumers noted this that the rental selection was better for VHS, and began favor VHS machines even more heavily. In response, to the increased demand for VHS tapes, the rental outlets cut back still further on beta to favor VHS. Within a couple of years after rental outlets became common, I began to see stores eliminating their beta departments. Around that time, Sony dropped the price of beta VCRs to make them competitive with VHS, but by then it was too late for Sony to catch up.
Actually, I think that Apple is in a pretty good position. They can say to Cisco, "Either license us the name at a reasonable price, or we'll change the name just before introduction, just like we did with iTV--I mean AppleTV. Everybody will call it iPhone, anyway."
The pictures show what is labeled as an "iPod Connector," looking just like the port on current iPods.
However, it has bluetooth, raising the question of whether it will work with a bluetooth keyboard
More likely, the iPhone voice. Fits entirely into the headset. You program your call list from your computer and ask for them by name. If you want to call somebody else, you have to read off the digits.
Most folks have 2 year contracts and at any given time half of them are less than 1 year in.
On the other hand, there may be some pent-up demand. The main reason that I haven't bought a new cell-phone was fear (justified, I now see) that I would be kicking myself if I was locked into a contract when Apple finally came out with one.
The bad news is that I was hoping to get away from Cingular.
All of which were well understood, predictable risks, that could be dealt with by simple, logical safeguards. But this is more along the lines of "What if such a big ship attracts a giant squid from deep undersea that drags everybody down to a watery grave?"
Yes, in principle, it may be just barely possible that cloning could result in a mutation that causes overproduction of a protein with no noticeable ill effects in the animal, yet survives proteolytic conditions in the stomach and digestive tract, and results in a rare neurodegenerative disease in humans.
Of course, none of this really has anything to do with cloning, which is not particularly prone to produce mutations. Such a mutation could just as well occur spontaneously and be propagated by selective breeding. For that matter, it may have already happened. Such a mutation might be naturally present in any food that we are already eating. There are a number of rare neurodegenerative diseases. It is certainly possible that some of them are due to a protein that is present in wheat or potatoes or corn (all of which have limited genetic variability). If you are really paranoid about this sort of thing, you could avoid eating any food with low genetic variability.
But wait! Who knows how big a dose of the deadly protein it takes to induce the disease? Maybe it takes only a single dose! It is certainly theoretically possible. In that case, eating foods with high genetic variability is precisely the worst thing you can do, because it would increase your risk of exposure to the deadly protein! To be safest, you should be eating only cloned foods and other foods with low genetic variability!
Of course, hardly anybody is going to worry much about the possibility that there might be a harmful prion in the foods that they already eat. It may be a theoretical possibility, but next to other food related risks, such as heart disease and food-borne infections, it is fairly obvious that prions in the diet (which in the worst known case cause human disease only very rarely) are far, far down on the worry list. But tie it to a new technology, and suddenly it is seen as horribly plausible. Fundamentally, however, it is merely another rationalization for fear of change--an unreasoning paranoia about anything that is new and different.
I merely asked you for just one single example to support your own claim that
One would think that if this is true for the "vast majority" of crop patents held by Monsanto fit this description, that you would be able to come up with just one example in no time. You are the one who made the claim, so it is your obligation to support it. Frankly, it sounds like bull to me, and the little bit of reading that I've done supports that impression. I'm not going to bother doing extensive research to disprove obvious nonsense if you are too lazy to support your own claims.
So if you've researched the issue, why are you seemingly unable to answer my rather simple question:
What pre-existing crop variety has been patented by Monsanto without any form of modification by genetic engineering, selective breeding, or hybridization?
This link certainly doesn't support your claims. It describes how Monsanto lost a European patent when it was unable to demonstrate that the baking qualities of a wheat variety were the result of their genetic modification. This hardly supports your claim that the patent office is allowing Monsanto to patent pre-existing plant varieties simply because nobody else had done so.