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Comment Re:More ambiguous cruft (Score 1) 514

It's way too late to keep modified genes out of the environment. Every plant on Earth has already been fouled by genes modified through selective breeding and the use of chemical and radioactive substances to force mutations.

Virtually every item of produce in your local Whole Foods was created by human intervention, not nature. The corn we buy is vastly different than the natural plant man developed it from, teosinte. The same goes for beets, carrots, corn, beans & potatoes, to name just a few. The originals are either inedible, poisonous or so poorly suited to agriculture we'd all starve to death if farmers didn't grow the modified versions.
Over time, we turned grey wolves into french poodles. Given enough time Monsanto could likely have bred plants that are immune to Round-Up as well. But a business plan that requires a few hundred years of selective breeding and forced mutation to have a good chance of obtaining and stabilizing the desired genetic profile wouldn't be a sustainable business plan in modern society. Plus, with modern methods there's less risk the resulting plant will have unfavorable genes like the one that makes wild almonds astringent tasting and poisonous instead of non-toxic and delicious like our selectively bred versions.

Comment Re:Good news, bad news (Score 1) 628

How much do you pay for the air you are breathing? Now imagine most goods and services are like that. This is where things start "growing on trees".

Ain't gonna happen, and your analogy is false. Nobody has ever paid for air, but they have paid for food.

Scuba divers, welders, athletes, people with medical issues and fad businesses like Oxygen bars routinely exchange money for air.

Comment Re:But DC is different,no? (Score 1) 588

If Obama was doing to do anything of real merit, he'd have moved to have pot taken off schedule 1 at the very least to allow for real medical investigation of the plant.

If he had wanted to do more, he could have put it to the states to decide.

Obama doesn't have the power to do any of those things. That's Congress' show. Despite the rhetoric, Obama isn't a dictator with unlimited power.

If the feds re-schedule it before there is enough public support than you will see a bunch of outraged state legislators quickly moving to make it illegal at state level, to "protect our children" of course.

Precisely.

Comment Re:But DC is different,no? (Score 2) 588

Yeah. The feds have mostly left the legal marijuana industry alone.
They will of course jump on anyone who goes outside what the laws allow, like those that think it's ok to ship cannabis to other states or countries or who aren't operating within the law in some other manner. Enforcing laws between states and foreign countries is what the Feds are supposed to do. Doing it isn't violating the administration's stance.
With only a couple of exceptions, mostly cases that were likely already in progress when the announcement was made, no one who was raided has been prosecuted for anything that was legal under state law. A few are up for weapons charges, a few are up for illegally transporting cannabis across state lines, a few for distributing cannabis via USPS, a few for distribution of non-cannabis drugs and a few were suspected to have foreign cartel ties.

Comment Re:Alibaba's AliExpress store is ripe with fakes (Score 1) 191

AliExpress is irrelevant to investors. Alibaba owns the Chinese equivalents of Ebay, Amazon and Paypal. That's the part they're interested in.
That, and Alibaba's B2B sales. I know several local clothing stores, ecig retailers, mall kiosks & boutique shops which get all their stock almost exclusively via Alibaba.com and I'm sure there's a ton of places I don't know about that do the same. The same applies online. Half the stuff on Ebay and Amazon's marketplace likely come from Alibaba suppliers (many of them use images with alibaba watermarks ffs) so investing gets an investor a small piece of the US retail market as well.

Comment Re:Any Memory?? what judge will go on just that? (Score 1) 415

Federal Article III Judges may rubber stamp warrants for Government law enforcement, but state and local judges are either elected or appointed by elected officials . A judge at that level who rubber stamps warrants is taking a big risk for almost no promise of a reward. A judge can make cops work a little harder to establish solid probable cause with little risk of consequence while a judge who routinely enables cops to do things like tear apart some innocent old couple's home looking for drugs based on a tip that turns out to be a crank call is not likely to get reelected or reappointed when their term ends. It does happen of course, but it's a lot more rare than people seem to think it is.

As for cops, there were over 460,000 local cops in the US in 2010. According to the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project, In 2010 there was 6,613 officers accused of misconduct. Of those, only about 3000 were accused of on-the-job misconduct towards citizens (the rest were things like domestic violence, drug use, or DUI committed while off duty that still violate police codes of conduct). The rate of perpetrators of violent crime among normal citizens was 429.4 per 100k while among cops it was 409.3 per 100k,

Cops are utterly average in how "bold" they are compared to regular citizens. They're just people doing an extremely necessary job for which they get paid crap, are exposed to constant risks and get nothing but disrespect and derision from those they work for in return. I'm amazed more of them aren't complete assholes.

Comment Re:Any Memory?? what judge will go on just that? (Score 1) 415

The cops already had some kind of information or evidence that the person was in possession of child pornography. Whatever it was, it was enough to convince the judge probable cause existed. That information or evidence was is what the judge went on when he issued them a search warrant to look for it.

Since the cops were specifically looking for child porn, memory sticks would certainly be a part of the search warrant. Since that's what they were looking for, they were going to look to see what was on it no matter where it was found. Leaving it on a desk would only have made it easier for them to get their hands on it. By hiding it there was at least a chance the cops wouldn't find it.
And he might have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for that meddling memory sniffing dog.

Comment Re: It's 2014 (Score 1) 349

Cox has limits in their ToS, but they very, very rarely enforce them.

I got an email every month for over a year that I'd gone over as I always went way over my 250gb cap, often by 2x-3x. 2 teens with Netflix and Hulu accounts, Steam, Youtube... it adds up quick. But I never once got anything more than an automated e-mail when I went over the cap. I did end up getting one of their home office plans last year (which they've apparently recently discontinued offering) since in my area it was the same price for the same speeds (25/5), without any data caps and with business class service (I can, and have, had a truck here within an hour at 3am to fix an outage).

I've heard that some people have had service suspended where they have to call to get it reactivated; but that seems to mostly be relegated to when they detect people's bandwidth being used nefariously without their knowledge and is used more to force people to call in so they can be walked through doing a virus scan. So far anyway. They're likely just waiting for TW and/or Comcast to jump through all the hoops first before they start trying to milk the caps themselves.

Comment Re:records go back to 1880, very funny (Score 1) 547

Farther north and your weekend is filled with the sounds of snowblowers and chainsaws, the ping of salt and gravel bouncing off of undercarriages and windshields, the scrape and roar of plows etc...
I started in the central valley of California but temps up to 120F in Summer, where opening your front door felt like getting punched in the face by an angry fire god, got annoying. So I moved to Northern Pennsylvania and found that shoveling 2 feet of snow every morning to get the car out of the driveway, spending all night listening to the sound of trees exploding from -20 temps and having to don 80lbs of clothing before opening the front door got annoying even faster.
So I moved to the midsouth. Temps rarely go beyond 100F for more than a couple days at a time in summer, very rarely go below 0 in winter and a couple inches of snow shuts down the entire region. And if bikinis are your thing, you can always find a fat woman in a bikini at 3am in the local Walmart winter or summer! :)

Comment Re:Not really (Score 1) 228

So what about those of us who refuse a smartphone for various reasons? I wouldn't mind having one but I'm not going to shell out another $20/month for internet on a device that I mainly use in a place where I already pay for the internet.

They'll obviously give you the option of having a physical credit card.... for $20/month extra.

Comment Re:Two Problems (Score 1) 164

And did/will you go out and get a Ph.D. in Infant Nutrition before you have a child and need to feed them? Be sure to pick up a degree in math, science and English while you're at it so you can be qualified to help them with their homework.

They aren't looking for funding to build a bridge, they just want to make a campy little entertainment program to encourage kids to read.
Some things require training and expertise to do well. God help our species if getting kids to read is one of things.

Comment Re:In addition to rolling out... (Score 1) 129

It seems to be "density of neighborhoods". Places with lots of multistory apartment buildings, subdivisions, etc tend to be cheaper than places where you'll commonly see a residential house flanked by a warehouse and a 7-11.

Local competition of course drives prices down. The price per Mb in Omaha and Vegas are over $3 where the only real competition is wireless carriers but it's well under $3 in Phoenix where Cox has competition from Cable One. Of course there's numerous other factors, from easement restrictions to local infrastructure to geography, that can also affect the price or offerings.

Comment Re:Ridiculous (Score 0) 334

A more apt analogy is you're that alcoholic and you have a friend who has been given permission to enter your home. He finds out that while you were drunk, you made a lecherous pass at his sister and so, in anger, he comes in when you are drunk and takes pictures of you covered in vomit passed out on your bathroom floor and then starts passing them around to your friends, family, coworkers and the Internet.

Do you really believe your poor judgement in giving him consent to enter your home and then doing something to anger him gives him the right to use even worse judgement in abusing that consent in an attempt to defame you to the entire world?

Comment Re:In addition to rolling out... (Score 1) 129

Not to interrupt your rambling Limbaugh fellating, but Cox doesn't spread costs across their entire customer base.
They use regional pricing based on the cost of serving that area, in theory anyway. I'm sure that in reality, they charge whatever they think they can get from the people in that area. But areas with more densely packed residential areas do tend to have lower prices and don't seem to significantly subsidize service offerings in less densely packed areas which usually have higher prices.

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