Well, yes it is, since it doesn't have an infinite half-life and doesn't move around by itself. You're certainly not going to find it used in Montana wheatfields, yet CCD has affected bees here as well... so now what to blame?? Indeed, most of our acreage is never treated with anything, being non-arable grazing land or wilderness. Hasn't helped bees any.

I'd guess in addition to the viral and fungal agents that when they occur together have been determined as CCD causes already, there might be a genetic susceptibility in some lines of bees, but far as I know that hasn't been looked at yet.

I'm reminded that many a time, some OMG-Death-Chemical reaction has proven to in fact be due to a genetic defect. Frex, see MDR1 (multi-drug resistance gene) in dogs. Nope, it wasn't ivermectin causing illness and death; it was a genetic defect.

My Data = My Property.

I posted a reply to a post by SirGeek.

Is the above sentence my data or yours?

"Neonicotinoids in bees: a review on concentrations, side-effects and risk assessment"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

"Many lethal and sublethal effects of neonicotinoid insecticides on bees have been described in laboratory studies, however, no effects were observed in field studies with field-realistic dosages."

As they say there's need for further study regarding synergistic effects and the like. But real exposure effects in the field are what counts, not just laboratory findings. Otherwise it's like finding that table salt is OMG-toxic as studied in the lab, even tho we know it's safe in normal realworld use.

Honeybees are technically an invasive species in North America; they were imported, not native. There are numerous other species, including small native bees, that did the pollination work before honeybees came along. Far as I have heard, populations of these native bees have not been affected by CCD.

Neonicotinoids are relatively expensive (4 years ago, Imidacloprid was $25/pound, about 5x the cost of permethins), and I'd guess despite being about a quarter of the insecticide market, that in ag they are probably not used outside of the fairly limited areas that grow fruits and vegetables -- as those crops have a better profit margin. Yet CCD has been seen very widely, including in areas where there isn't any row-crop agriculture.

Anecdotally, I've used Imidacloprid to control desert stink beetles, and did not observe any issues with my wild honeybees (who frequented the same areas, cuz that's where the water was).

The scare over DDT was manufactured. Silent Spring (which I read, back when it was new) was mostly fiction and has been discredited, yet it influenced a whole generation of environmentalism -- that, not truth, was its point and intent. Some estimates put malaria deaths due to ending use of DDT in the millions. Meanwhile, the connection with condor populations was at best tenuous.

I own a shitload of DVDs. But I usually watch downloads. Why? Because no need to rip it first, it's already handy, and no risk of scratching my disks. The disks are backups.

Just curious, what monitor do you have?

Actually there's a pretty good trail being laid down:

http://missoulian.com/news/loc...

Not only that, but per this article (with stats), bee populations are stable to increasing despite CCD:

http://www.perc.org/articles/e...

The amount of honey being produced is a good indicator, given you can't make honey without bees.

This won't load for me but I imagine it goes into more detail:
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/br/...

And actually, you can demonstrate 'insanity' in any wild colony with an aging queen -- the bees become aggressive at greater and greater distances from the hive. I watched this with a wild colony that had taken up residence in the wall of a barn. For the first three years, they were 'gentle' (not concerned about intruders) -- to the point that you could actually poke around in their entryway without incurring any retaliation. The 4th year, they got twitchy about people walking nearby. The 5th year, they regularly chased people who passed within about 20 feet of their hive entrance. The colony died off entirely that winter. Far as I saw, it never swarmed, indicating they didn't produce any new queens.

We probably don't see this in domesticated colonies because modern beekeepers are diligent about replacing queens in a timely manner. But I asked an old-timer about it (who'd been in the bee business since the 1930s) and he said that was all perfectly normal for a colony with an old queen.

... now all it needs is a light side and a dark side.

Sometimes common sense is just wrong, particularly when it comes to predicting the behavior of other people who might not agree with what you consider "common sense". If you check his publications in Google Scholar, this guy's been publishing surgical neuroscience papers in real journals since around 1990. I think he really intends to try this.

Fraud she certainly is, but the fraud was so transparent that clearly she's not right in her head.

While the financial aspect of this makes her culpable, building an outrageous fraud around readily disprovable details of your personal biography is a very bad idea in the long run if you're simply a con artist. Doing that suggests that there are short term needs that trump simple financial considerations. Perhaps she felt she deserved more sympathy, nurturance and nurturance than she'd gotten in life. That's common enough that there's name for it: Factitious Disorder.

Over the years I've read many stories of people who assumed false biographies. Most often this took obvious forms -- passing for white before the Civil Rights Era. But in some cases people chose to assume minority identities, particularly as American Indians in the early 20th C. Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance was (by the terminology of the age) a negro with some Cherokee ancestry. He ran away to join a wild west show where he learned from Cherokee language from other performers, used that to get into Carlisle Indian School and later traded up his "Cherokee" identity for a Plains Indian one. Wenjiganooshiinh -- "Grey Owl" -- was an Englishman who was abandoned by his father in childhood then later adopted an Apache/Ojibwe identity.

What makes these two men relevant to this case is that they were both advocates of Indian rights. As outsiders, they understood what sympathetic outsiders wanted Indians to be better than an Indian would. And they would't have been able to pull it off if they weren't a little off their nut; if they didn't want to escape who they were for a more glamorous alternative.

If involves breaking the law -- not just some kind of namby-pamby administrative regulation but the basic stuff of civilization like like the prohibitions on assault or murder -- then I'll sure as hell tell what not to do.

If you're a veteran I'll gladly shake your hand and thank you for your service. I'd be honored to buy you a drink. But I won't hand you a get out of jail free card.

Have a little perspective. Yes it's wrong to impersonate a veteran, but it doesn't impugn the character of veterans. But claiming that all veterans will and should overreact to a breach of propriety with violence *does* impugn their character. Which is worse?

Well, the idea of copyright is to incent creators to create, not to reward them per se. So the sensible way of approaching is to ask how many years in advance a reasonable person would make economic plans for.

Corporations seldom worry about income streams ten years out; such future income is discounted to insignificance. On the other hand an artist planning on managing his own creations might very reasonable think about fifty years out. Seventy-five years is beyond the pale of reason if we're talking about incenting creation. So is any extension of pre-existing copyrights.

If we wanted to maximize the present value of future income to an artist contemplating creating or performing a song, I think a fifty year term would be reasonable, with the proviso that any assigned rights automatically return to him without encumbrance after ten or fifteen years. Such an arrangement would have no impact economic on his ability to sell the rights to his work immediately, and hold out the promise of getting a second bite of the apple in a decade or so.

There's a phase people go through in life where commitments pile up and play becomes something we intend to get around to. Look around. If you decorate your office space with posters of kayaking/rock climbing/whatever you're into, but you haven't actually done it in the last year because you don't have time, you have entered that phase.

The thing is, people in that phase still dress the part of their younger selves. And for a while at least they even still buy the stuff, until they don't have space for it.

People buy SUVs, even though they're ridiculously impractical for their situation, as a fashion statement. Turning a car from a utilitarian object into a fashion statement is what automobile marketing is all about. Look at SUV ads; what you're telling the world (or perhaps yourself) is that maybe on a whim you'll go off-roading or picnicking on the beach, instead of commuting to and from work, making runs to the supermarket, or chauffeuring your kids to soccer and music lessons. It could happen. Only it won't.

That's the reason SUVs back into parking spaces. Subconsciously their drivers are longing for a quick escape that will never come. SUVs would be the saddest of vehicles, or they would be if the people who bought them had a little more self-awareness.

it would be quite detrimental if users were force to render content on web pages.

Not to mention: Difficult!

Think about what all is involved in creating a new "modern" browser, especially if you have to start from scratch instead of basing it on Webkit or Gecko. "Oops, I have a bug in how word-break works, and it just got me fined. Worse, someone found out that I hadn't really disabled the load-images option, and that I had simply removed it from the preferences page. I'm still working on my court case over that one."

That's why I think we ought to give them all the rope they want. Auto-makers, please, please go on using the word "dangerous" in spite of your actual agenda. I can only hope that one of those sacks of shit says "won't somebody think of the children?"