Whether science or not science, who cares. The Taco Cowboy's comment is just stupid. What is it exactly what he is worried about? First of all they will self destruct under processing conditions. Will the modified poplars take over the world and then mutate to self destruct without assistance or will these self-destruction genes drift to other subspecies of poplars? The self destruction, if it happened without any processing, would not be a feature that made a tree fit for survival, common sense says - so these genes wouldn't prevail anyway then.

Lets put things into context. In Fukushima, the main problem was that they didn't have a seawall, unlike in Onagawa. You could also point out the Chernobyl disaster. The key problems there were old technology compared to today, combined with soviet halfassery and the fact that they made a conscious effort to make the plant go boom under the name of "safety testing".
http://slashdot.org/story/12/0...
Sources for Chernobyl disaster: go find your own.

"variety, which is fissile (= radioactive, potentially dangerous and useable as nuclear fuel)" Fissile does not equal radioactive. All uranium isotopes are radioactive. And for the 238 isotope the term applies - fissionable, which means the fission can be brought on by high energy neutrons.
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/r...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

In a research done by Liebetanz on rats, it appeared that it would take tDCS current density of 142.9A/m2 for durations greater than 10 minutes to cause lesions in rats brains. So if we take a tDCS device that has relatively small electrodes, like 3x3cm, we would need at least 128.61mA current for more than 10 minutes to cause any brain damage. Given that even 2mA (most typical) sessions can cause skin burns when the electrodes have been poorly prepared, the currents above 127.8mA would probably feel torturous. I think the user would figure out that there is something really wrong fairly quickly. Typical DIY device uses a 9V convenient store battery as a power source, its capacity could be around 400-1200mAh, which means the subject would only get less than 10 seconds of 129mA "fun" if everything goes wrong, in case the internal resistance of the battery would allow that high current, but it won't.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

You are right, so that must mean there is no need to complain about legality of the Soviet Union dissolution either. I am fine with this one too.

Where's the "I only use Bitcoins to buy drugs" option?

Assembling the Soviet Union was illegal, so any laws and treaties made by Soviet Union are void anyway.

Reminds me of the Goiânia accident. A modern horror story.

- "His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate a sandwich while sitting on the floor. She was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, and applying it to her body, showed it off to her mother. Dust from the powder fell on the sandwich she was consuming"

By the way, it was the Eastern Front, which claimed 80 percent of all German military casualties in the war. So basically, it was one evil empire against other and the winning one got away with its crimes. That is the reality. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/21/arts/a-job-for-rewrite-stalin-s-war.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

A DDOS Attack

The DDOS attack method is the most primitive attack method besides a hammer. It cannot be considered a serious threat if things are done right. It could merely be a discomfort and a publicity stunt - that was also the case in the above mentioned DDOS attacks five years ago. One banks web page (a front end) wasn't available for a couple of hours, and maybe something else as well, but the core functionalities were intact.

A virus Affecting votes Inside the Servers

The servers receiving the votes should be at least duplicated (guessing here) so that the virus would have to have infected them all to affect the results without anybody noticing.

Over all I agree with you that no system is 100% safe of course.

There is also an electronic voting system in Estonia that uses ID cards (a smart card) for secure authentication. There is also a short summary about the secrecy scheme of the voting process in the document referenced below.
http://www.vvk.ee/public/dok/Internet_Voting_in_Estonia.pdf

If you read the abstract of the article then it states that the tasks presented to the subjects where -"tasks requiring social cognition, i.e., reasoning about the mental states of other persons, and tasks requiring physical cognition, i.e., reasoning about the causal/mechanical properties of inanimate objects". Social reasoning does not equal empathy. Empathy requires one to share and understand others feelings while social reasoning is something a sociopath could do.