The only thing she knew for sure was that it sucks to have a kid with autism. The rest was crap. She, and a few like her, caused most of the US anti-vax movement.
And she didn't even know that, because her kid does not have autism.
The job of any government agency to defend the constitution. It's the job of the judicial branch. Furthermore, you actually expect a spy agency to protect the constitution? That's not even close to their job.
The naivete some have on this issue is rather surprising given the demographics of the site.
Employees at the NSA take an oath to defend the constitution. From the NSA's website:
NSA/CSS employees are Americans first, last, and always. We treasure the U.S. Constitution and the rights it secures for all the people. Each employee takes a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
It's not naivete, it's just expecting them to do what they SWORE TO DO.
"Consumption" was an old name for tuberculosis. TB is normally transferred through the air, not food contamination.
From the CDC:
"Before the invention and acceptance of pasteurization, raw milk was a common source of the bacteria that cause tuberculosis,
Pretty much every retail employee on the planet already has to deal with this, but without the ability to have a mysterious hardware failure at (in)convenient times.
This. There are cameras in my office, if I went around cutting the wires to each camera I would no longer have a job and would probably be brought up on criminal charges. Our security department also has the ability to monitor my computer at any time. People in tons of different professions are monitored while they are working and many are tested to determine if they are doing company-prohibited activities while not at work. There is no reason why police should be excluded from the same kind of surveillance. In fact, many people would argue that there is a more compelling interest in monitoring police than almost any other profession.
Pedantry is alive and well, it seems. I understood him just fine. Perhaps you should of not been so pedantic.
Well done sir! [sounds of applause]
Here it is:
Monsanto using MPAA and RIAA tactics (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tue Apr 08, '14 06:24 PM (#46700087)
Monsanto and Cargil do some really shitty things with their IP when it comes to their seeds - like suing farmers for having Monsanto's crops growing in their fields when they weren't purchased and suing seed washers for alleged violations of IP.
That wasn't a case of cross-pollination at all, that was a case of a farmer (who normally used Monsanto seed and had a contract with them) buying soybeans intended for consumption, planting them and spraying them with roundup to kill any non-roundup ready stock, then using that seed stock year after year for planting. The supreme court ruled (9-0) that he was intentionally violating the patent that Monsanto holds on that variety of Soy. Bowman's defense was "patent exhaustion", basically the right to sell something that you had previously bought. The courts found that this was not the case and ruled that Bowman was creating new copies of a patented invention and so patent exhaustion did not apply. From the Supreme Court decision:
the purchaser of that article could make and sell endless copies, the patent would effectively protect the invention for just a single sale. Bowman himself disputes none of this analysis as a general matter: He forthrightly acknowledges the “well settled” principle “that the exhaustion doctrine does not extend to the right to ‘make’ a new product.” Brief for Petitioner 37 (citing Aro, 365 U. S., at 346).
Unfortunately for Bowman, that principle decides this case against him. Under the patent exhaustion doctrine, Bowman could resell the patented soybeans he purchased from the grain elevator; so too he could consume the beans himself or feed them to his animals. Monsanto, although the patent holder, would have no business interfering in those uses of Roundup Ready beans. But the exhaustion doctrine does not enable Bowman to make additional patented soybeans without Monsanto’s permission (either express or implied). And that is precisely what Bowman did. He took the soybeans he purchased home; planted them in his fields at the time he thought best; applied glyphosate to kill weeds (as well as any soy plants lacking the Roundup Ready trait); and finally harvested more (many more) beans than he started with. That is how “to ‘make’ a new product,” to use Bowman’s words, when the original product is a seed.
So not only did you not provide what was asked (an example of accidental cross-pollination where Monsanto sued a farmer who did not take specific steps to exploit the accident) but the example you did provide the farmer is clearly in the wrong. If the SC rules unanimously against your case, there is not a ton of ambiguity on the merits.
Perhaps people oppose Monsanto because of this tactic:
1) Claim a patent on seeds Monsanto makes.
2) Get some farmers to buy the seeds.
2 a) Lock the farmers in by stipulating that they can't take any seeds the plant produces and plant them again next year... like people have done for thousands of years!
3) Find a nearby farmer who isn't buying Monsanto and claim they they've planted Monsanto.
4) Find one instance of their plants growing on that farmer's land. (Ignore that seeds travel by air/animals and spread... like seeds have done for millions of years!)
5) Tie up the farmer in court until they either agree to buy Monsanto or they go bankrupt.
6) Repeat 2a - 5.
Your steps seem accurate up to #3. In the only case I have seen about this (the Percy Schmeiser case in Canada) the farmer intentionally killed the part of his crop that was not contaminated so that he could identify the plants that had been cross contaminated with the monsanto genes. He then planted ONLY THAT SEED for the express purpose of using Roundup pesticide on the resulting crop. This wasn't a case of "find one instance of their plants growing on that farmer's land", it was a case of the farmer taking specific steps to isolate the roundup-ready seeds and use them for their pesticide resistance. Here is a story from NPR that discusses that case, hardly a source that would be biased for Monsanto. Monsanto specifically addresses the issue on their site as well, claiming "Monsanto has never sued a farmer when trace amounts of our patented seeds or traits were present in the farmer’s field as an accident or as a result of inadvertent means.". If you have a source to refute that claim then please provide it.
I know that spelling out the facts for you probably won't change your mind on this issue but maybe if someone is actually looking for actual truths instead of strawmen it will help them. I hate Monsanto as much as the next guy, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons to hate them - you don't have to resort to claims that aren't supported by facts.
I really wish people would stop with the assumption that every possible job out there must support a family of four as the sole income source.
This. How many of the lower-paid Walmart workers are the primary breadwinners for their family? And what skills to they bring to the table that they should be paid more?
The reason they are not paid very much is because it is a very low-skill job that pretty much anybody can do. This means that they are easily replacable so they have no negotiating power when considering salary. If these people want to earn more money they should develop skills that would be worth more to an employer than their current skillset which seems to consist of "able to breathe oxygen".
According to page 43 of this study, men drive about 50% more miles per year than women.
The GP's link shows that men account for 2.5x as many traffic fatalities.
So men are clearly still worse according to these statistics. But why trust these numbers? Insurance companies make their money by having teams of extremely smart, highly trained statisticians pore over more data than you'll see in a lifetime, and they charge women less. I don't see how anyone could rationally argue that women are worse drivers while knowing that fact.
Women have more more accidents overall and much more likely to have an injury accident than men per mile driven (source). Males, particularly young males are much more likely to take risks than females. Young males are 2.1 more likely to be in a fatal accident but the rates start converging and by age 60 there isn't a difference in the fatal accident rate. But for non-fatal accidents females consistently are more likely to be involved. I couldn't find any data on insurance rates by gender, do you have a source for that?
And, come on now, tell the whole story. For AT&T to be able to deliver Netflix's data all the way to the home routers of their customers, they also have to maintain arrangements with other carriers to handle that data as it comes in from Netflix. Those peering arrangements are not free, just like maintaining that last mile to their end user customers isn't free.
Nope, those peering arrangements are not free, generally AT&T gets paid since it is a tier 1 network. They are also already getting paid by their customer (and also by the government) for maintaining the last mile infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the guy who buys bandwidth and uses it for a less Netflix/YouTube-centric array of connections absolutely is going to be asked to contribute to his neighbor's entertainment costs if the GP has his way and AT&T raises their rates across the board to deal with the behavior of a subset of users and remote content sources.
Companies and people have been screaming about this for years, well before Netflix was a company. Unless the industry switches (back) to a usage model it will always be this way. AT&T is free to bill their customers (and their network peers) whatever and however they like, but they shouldn't be able to charge their customer's customer.
I think the reason many people have a problem with this is because they are already getting gouged by these companies for internet, cable TV and phone service. The cablecos provide terrible customer service, little network maintenance and a product where you are forced to buy a bundle of crap you don't want to get a few things you want (A la carte pricing, anyone?) and in exchange for this they have been granted monopolies and a captive customer base. They are making money hand-over-fist with enviable margins and the greedy fuckers want MORE? Fuck them.
AT&T & Comcast don't own the road, they only own part of the road. They have a deal with another road system (Cogent) that cars from their systems can drive on Cogent's roads and cars from Cogent's system can drive on their roads. Netflix already pays Cogent for their road access and the end-user already pays AT&T for road access. If AT&T has a beef, it is either with their customer or Cogent, not with Netflix.
This isn't telephony. It's a data communications issue, upon which rides both time-sensitive data (audio, video) and non-time sensitive data. AT&T's arrogance is that of Southwestern Bell's (remember, this is not the AT&T of old) vision for profits.
It's a monopolistic view. It's the old "we own the highway" versus "we gave you rights of way because you were a municipal and regional utility". I say we reclaim the rights of way, and meter AT&T for their belligerence. That'll fix it for everyone.
Who is "we"? The people? The people have no power, how are they going to reclaim these rights of way? The government? The government won't do anything because of the way campaigns are financed and the corrupting influence of power. The government gave the telcos BILLIONS of the people's dollars to build out high-speed networks - which they have obviously failed to do.
The problem is that nobody (outside of the narrow
which attempts to education journalists in how to process
We should attempts to education the editors in how to process a story!
"In the Bible, Christ preaches that his followers should pay their taxes. You know 'Render unto Rome what is Rome's...". I believe that fundamentalist christian churches should volutarily be paying taxes, even if the law does not require it. "
First, churches are not their followers... the followers do pay taxes.
Not on money they give to their church. So it's really 2 tax exemptions, the one for the individual deducting money given to the church and one for income to the church not being taxed. If the church were a business (it's not, it's a virus - the only goal of a church is to grow) it would have had to pay taxes on the income and the individual would have to pay taxes as well, Meanwhile, the rest of us pick up that tax shortfall (and pay for the "quiverfull" families).
TrueCrypt is decent, but it can't hurt to have a utility that is updated and maintained with similar functionality. Truecrypt is going over two years without an update. It is a very good program, but PGP has a lot of functionality (public/private key exchange and upkeep, web of trust, etc.) that TC doesn't have.
Of course, one can use GNUpg and TrueCrypt. The command line works well, but GUI-wise, Symantec Encryption Desktop Professional (i.e. PGP Desktop) is just a lot easier to get around in.
One side note -- PGP Desktop isn't officially supported on Windows 8 and 8.1... but it does work.
Recent releases of PGP Desktop do support Windows 8/8.1: Symantec Encryption Desktop 10.3.2 compatibility with Microsoft Windows 8/8.1
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!
