Spinach doesn't copy its DNA into a host.
No, but viruses often incorporate DNS from hosts, so a virus could grab DNA from spinach and inject it into an orange. That's what dgatwood is talking about -- viruses do this all the time, copying DNA between hosts. Humans are just doing what viruses do already, but with more precision and less randomness.
Show many ANY time in nature where plants have modified themselves with ANIMALS and FISH
That's the Naturalistic Fallacy. Just because something doesn't occur in nature (I'll concede the term "in nature" as meaning "not done by humans") doesn't mean its bad, and just because something does occur in nature doesn't mean it's good.
Your exact argument could be applied to anything artificial: show me ANY time in nature where animals have harnessed electricity to build general-purpose information-processing devices and network them together, for example. Yet I don't see you crying for dismantling the Internet.
Show me ANY time in nature where animals synthesize chemicals that narrowly target diseases, and thus vastly improve their ability to survive. But you're not crying for the end of synthetic medicines.
Show me ANY time in nature where water is systematically treated to destroy infectious agents before it's consumed. But you're not crying for the end of water-treatment facilities.
Show me ANY time in nature where animals engineer vehicles to make transport faster and easier. But you're not campaigning for an end to bicycles.
cripple the NSA, and you give free and secure communication to all sorts of undesirables. Allow the NSA unchecked, and make people transparent to the Government, (and worse expose them to typically stupid Government dragnet trawling).
That's a false dilemma. We have many more options than an unchecked NSA or a "crippled" NSA (though, note that taking away their ability to spy on US Citizens is only "crippling" in the sense that it would require them to return to their chartered mission as a foreign intelligence service...).
For example, most people aren't arguing that the NSA shouldn't be allowed to collect any of the sort of data they've been caught collecting. Just that it should have limited scope, and that they should have real accountability if they abuse their power. That neither cripples them (despite their claims) nor allows them unchecked, and that's just a simple example.
all electronic communications must be "tappable" unless you want to provide absolutely everyone with a safe channel for communication about their criminal, terrorist, or otherwise hostile business.
It's not quite that simple, even if it seems so on its face. When you make all communication tappable, you don't just allow the government access to communications of suspected bad actors. You also create something that can be abused by people in power (remember that the government is made up of people, and people do stupid things on a regular bases) -- from little things like a government worker using the capability to spy on a spouse to big things like government cracking down on dissent. And you create a system that can be attacked; if the US government can read your email, so can an attacker or a foreign government.
Keep in mind that the government is who defines what "criminal" is. If they have unlimited surveillance power -- even if it's only limited to "criminals" -- then it's a simple matter to change what "criminal" means until they can effectively listen in to any conversation they want. And quash dissent. Remember that almost every important campaign for rights involved "criminal" things -- from the fight for Women's Suffrage to the protests and campaigns for civil rights in the 1960's. These movements did "criminal" things in part to point out that they shouldn't be criminal things. To give the government absolute ability to stop criminal activity would be a very bad thing.
people weigh two things. One, how likely it is. Two, how scary it is.
There's a key point that you missed: the scarier something is, the more likely we think it is (up to a point: if it's scary enough, we refuse to believe it could happen to us).
Money only buys votes with an uneducated electorate.
While that's almost certainly true, it doesn't follow that:
If voters really wanted to do something about this, they could.
Because most of the country relies on those in power for access to education. There may have been a time in recent memory where the populace was educated enough about how politics and power worked to make these changes, but those in power have been very effective at cutting those cords by controlling the media and education (through cutting funding, setting standards, outright buying media outlets and the like).
In order for it to change, people with money and power would need to put some effort into effectively educating voters. Which means doing the very thing they ultimately are trying to change -- pouring money into the political process.
No, the average American doesn't even understand these topics. The core problem with America is that the vast majority of the public are completely uninformed (often by choice) and apathetic about anything that doesn't affect them or someone they know directly.
The result is that we as a country have ceded control to people who want power, and the handful of "hardcore" voting blocs that reliably show up at the polls. We're a Republic of the Minority now.
Unless you're accessing all your services via SSH, you probably have passwords somewhere; SSH keys are only going to be a defense against access to the boxes you only SSH to. If you use any web application or service you don't self-host and authenticate only through SSH, revealed passwords are going to be an issue.
Yet another argument to move toward 2-factor auth....
Publicly posting all available personal data of judges and their families that serve on the FISA court might also serve to reverse this STASI-like system of secret courts and secret laws.
If only that would work. Unfortunately, when you show people in power that they're vulnerable too, they don't see the light and act for change -- they double-down. They decide that such acts are evidence that they need even more power.
Your comment is either astonishingly ignorant or really bad trolling:
If it were true that the Chromecast only allowed "Google approved content" as grandparent claims, that would be far more constraining than any of the devices you gave examples of.
Unfortunately for GP, they misunderstand Chromecast's limitations; direct, native streaming is only available for a few Google-approved sources, but anything the Chrome browser plays out of the box (including any HTML5 video, Flash objects, etc.) can be cast to the dongle; it's hardly as limited as "Google-approved sources", more like "stuff using technologies and formats that Google supports in Chrome".
The only non-standard part of Apple's charging scheme is the shape of the connector. The AC->DC adapter part is a standard switching power supply, the request on the USB end of the charging cable is compatible with USB Power standards, and so on.
The really proprietary parts of Apple's cable are the bits associated with the data interface (digital audio, control systems, accessory systems, etc.); which is frustrating, but not really surprising at this point considering the 30-pin connector they replaced has been around for a decade.
The *cable* carries 5VDC at 1A (or almost 2A for an iPad). The electrocution hazard for 5V devices is entirely in the switching power-supply... the part that takes your wall voltage and drops it to 5VDC. Poorly designing that part can lead to too much power on the cable, etc.
But if you use a decently-designed power supply, even the world's crappiest cable isn't going to be problematic.
UID trolling makes me giggle.
No, according to them, that information isn't private enough to require a warrant. It still requires a court order to obtain, and it's not considered public information.
If you're going to respond to a bad situation, you have to actually understand the real situation, or you're just going to get dismissed as ignorant.
The 4th Amendment requires due process of law to conduct a search, and Congress has the power to define what that due process looks like. In the case of "stored data", they've decided that "due process" only requires a court order.
Any 4th Amendment argument that a court order isn't sufficient due process is inherently one of interpretation regarding the intent of the 4th Amendment. This is one of the many reasons why the EFF is making a 1st Amendment challenge to the NSA's accessing of such metadata. The NSA followed established due process (they went to a FISC court and got a warrant), so there's no 4th Amendment claim really (unless you want to argue that the 4th's provisions were not intended to be satisfied by a secret court -- but again, that's interpretation).
The living breathing document doctrine is not saying that the text of the Constitution is mutable, but that rather as society changes, our interpretation of what it means changes too. This has caused some problems, but it's also the root of a lot of good things, like the decision that the guarantee of "Freedom of speech" extends to all forms of expression.
If there is a real civil emergency, you need the system to notify people whether they want the notification or not. The problem is that the city used this emergency notification system to tell people about a risk to one single individual.
Get hold of portable property. -- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"
