"So, cover the entire planet with corn for thousands of years and your single desired gene has a decent chance of appearing spontaneously."

Correct, if we were looking for a truly spontaneous event, you are absolutely correct. But we aren't. We're looking for a mutation as a result of a intentional change in environment, or as an existing trait that is intentional breed for.

If we are looking for a selectively bread Corn plant that is roundup resistant, averages 1.3+ ears per stalk, has a good flavor, has an acceptable growing period, and is disease/drought resistant for the regional climate, it's not like we're going to wait for the perfect kernel somewhere out in the 'corn world' to just by chance have all of those traits.

In fact, all of those traits except for the roundup resistance had already been developed through selective breeding long before scientists got involved.

If we take a field of non-GMO corn, and apply a light spraying of Roundup on it, much of the corn will die. But odds are some of the stalks will survive due to as you put it, "a relatively minor mutation to one or more existing genes which makes the plant more resistant". If we breed those surviving plants together, odds are that gene will propagate on, along with some minor mutations. And if we again spray the field with roundup, we will again kill off those without resistance. This is the exact same function whether we apply it to weeds or to corn.

Keep this up for a couple of generations and we have a roundup resistant corn plant without any scientists involved. From there, it's just a mater of selectively breeding back in a combination of taste/resilience/yield if any were lost over the previous selective breeding.

Spontaneously, yeah, incredibly unlikely to ever occur. Realistically though, a person could go out and do this in a small field over the next 20 years and have a product ready to ship.

-Rick

The generic MS drivers know how to see if the drive supports TRIM and send the commands if it does. That's the point of TRIM: It is an ATA standard command, so special software isn't needed.

In fact, in Windows all you use is the generic drivers. I mean you may install drivers for your SATA controller, but not for your drive. My laptop has a Samsung 840 Pro in it, with Samsung's Magician installed. However the drivers in use are disk.sys, partmgr.sys (both Microsoft files) and iastorf.sys (Intel's file). No Samsung provided drivers. Magician can directly send commands to optimize the drive if needed if the OS can't, but the OS sends TRIM commands no problem.

Or perhaps more likely "pro Russian shill" next time, spend a little more time doing research before you put together your bullshit theory. See you seem to have missed one little detail: This came from Russian TV. This isn't something that surfaced in the US, purporting to be originally from Russia, it was on Russian national television.

So, maybe think your bullshit conspiracy through next time,a nd make sure you know the sequence of events.

I hate this attitude that if you don't have the top spot, you are crap. It is so silly the attitude that the US somehow lost something by not having the first spot on the top 500 list.

I mean for one thing, the Chinese computer is more specialized than the big US supercomputers. It gets its performance using Intel Xeon Phi GPGPU type processors. Nothing wrong with hat but they are vector processors hanging off the PCIe bus. They work a lot like graphics cards. There are problems that they are very fast at, linpack (which is what's used to test) being one, but others they are not as fast at. Many of the US supercomputers (like BlueGene/Q) use just standard CPUs, meaning their performance holds steady over more kinds of tasks.

Then there's the fact that while the US might not have the #1 spot they have the #2, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 10 spots. In other words, half of the top 10 computers. That is more impressive than having one really big system. Ya it's nice to have a huge system and some simulations need really big systems to do, but there's something to be said for lots of different research groups having access to high power computers.

Also there's the fact that linkpack isn't necessarily the best benchmark.

I'm happy that the US is looking to invest more in HPC because money spent on research is always well spent in my opinion. However let's stop pretending like it is some major failure that the US doesn't have the #1 computer. Big deal.

I've seen the same kind of thing. I know a lady who's from Serbia. Very smart woman, and she's lived in the US for a couple decades, immigrated and become a citizen. However, when it comes to world news, she believes the Serbian media over all others. It's pretty bad too, it makes Fox News look credible (well almost) with the level of propaganda and shit. However, to her, that's the truth.

It seems a somewhat common thing that whatever you start getting your news from first is what sticks with you as the "true" news if there's disagreement later.

Geeks have real issues with the concepts of knowledge and intent mattering in the law. They think something is either ok, or not ok, and if it is ok it is ok in all situations. Of course that's not how the law work. Intent in particular matters a hell of a lot. Something can be illegal or legal just based off of intent, or can be a different level of crime. Likewise if you know you are helping someone commit a crime, that can get you in trouble whereas doing the same thing unknowingly can be fine.

It is complex, because it varies, there are crimes that don't require intent, or crimes where even doing it unknowingly will get you in trouble, but there are others that are not. It is complex with various shades of gray, which I guess is why geeks can't understand it. Many seem to be very binary thinkers and want absolutes in rules, which the law frequently doesn't have.

If MS drops support for all the Polycom Lync devices including conference speakerphones and desk phones, Bluetooth Lync headsets, etc, Corporate will be a hard sell.

Best of Lync and Skype should not obsolete all the business telcom hardware products in use by corporate users. That would be dropping the most useful parts.

I don't wear headphones all the time. I don't have disruptive speakers, and I can still hear my phone ring, and answer it, even while the PC is in a locked screensaver, in hibernation, or even rebooting.. Not all my job is screen time.

Do you ever reboot? Lock the screen and step out? Read a paper list, drawing, manual, or report?

Missing calls while not watching the screen or have another app on top is unacceptable.

Lync can be used with communications headsets. UN-checking the option to use the sound device only for communications permits using the headset for Lync as well as for all other PC sound playback.

The best option in my opinion is to use a desk phone for Lync calls. Polycom makes some nice ones as well as Snom. Alternate firmware can change the SIP phone into an OCS VOIP phone able to integrate with your Lync account. Search for Snom OCS firmware for more info.
Desk phone, speaker phone, or headset is your choice.

"given the extraordinarily low rate of mutations"

"low" is a relative term. In the case of corn, it's roughly 5.1 * 10^-5. Which sounds pretty low until you consider that each stalk will have 1-2 ears, and each ear has ~1000 kernels. And roughly 30,000 stalks per acre. Which means you're looking at dozens of mutations per acre. Yeah, processing that many kernels is going to be a royal PITA, but that's why we have undergrads ;) Even if you're just looking at grown plants, you're likely to see a mutation once every few acres.

"You are also ignoring the fact that in the time it takes for a new gene to be bred into a large portion of a species"

It is actually exactly the same either way. There isn't a massive assembly line of seed modification that alters 1 seed at a time. A select number of seeds are modified and breed in order to create the homozygous parents of the hybrid. As long as those seeds do not cross breed, you simply continue breeding that specified plant until you have sufficient quantities to sell (of both parents combined). It doesn't matter if the first seeds are from genetic manipulation or selective breeding.

"Contrast that with the ability to, say, insert bacterial genes into corn - something only possible through genetic modification"

I disagree with this assertion. It is possible through the sheer randomness of life for this same genetic change to occur. Again, I point to the existence of Roundup resistant weeds. They have by random mutation and environment changes developed similar genetic traits that closely match the intentional changes we made to the corn.

We could take the exact same approach to corn. Take non-Roundup ready corn, spray it with a small amount of Roundup, the more susceptible plants will die, the less susceptible plants will propagate. Next cycle, repeat the process, upping the dosage slightly. You will over a matter of a few generations wind up with a corn plant that is Roundup resistant. The problem though, is that you have no idea what other genetic traits have been propagated. Your corn may now have a longer growing period, may taste bad, may not be as disease resistant, etc... so you will need to take your new "non-GMO" Roundup resistant corn, and breed it back into plants that have your other desired traits. So after another pile of generations you'll wind up with a plant that is Roundup resistant, tastes good, grows well in your climate, and is resistant to drought/disease/etc...

Or instead of making it your life's goal of breeding corn, we can use technology to see what is the genetic difference between various Roundup resistant corn plants and non-resistant plants that have other traits we want. And in a period of just a few years you can have that same plant that would otherwise take a good bit of your life to breed.

At the end of the day, they are the exact same plant (genetically speaking). The only difference is whether you used science from the 1800's vs the 2000's.

There are risks to GMOs, specifically the homogenization of crops. For example, what we call a Banana today is not what our parents called a Banana decades ago. The banana propagates as a clone, exact genetic copies of itself. So if a disease or climate change occurs that effects 1 plant, it effect ALL plants. This is a risk with GMO as we wind up with far less genetic diversity by planting only the highest yielding seed lines. A single blight could wipe out masses of corn fields. But GMO doesn't cause such weaknesses, poor planning does. It takes all kinds, be it GMO, selective breeding, heirlooms, etc... bio diversity is a good thing.

-Rick

I think it's fine to buy them soon after release if you want them and can afford them (remember, to some people $60 for entertainment isn't a huge deal) so long as it has been properly reviewed and your research indicates it is a good game. There are plenty of games that launch strong, just as there are plenty that don't.

But never buy it before you can research if it is good, and if you are likely to enjoy it.

And I am one of many people who harp on the "Never preorder games!!" thing. So why do people do it? Two reasons:

One is they just get caught up in the hype. They are all excited and wanna have it as soon as possible. Silly, but human nature and it does happen time to time.

The other is that companies try to bribe you. They offer bonuses that you only get if your preorder, or that you have to pay for later. So there may be some day one DLC, but you can have it "free" if you preorder.

It is still, of course, and extremely bad idea to preorder and people should be talked out of it at every opportunity. Wait until it is out and reviewed, then decide if you want it.

The main reason peers block Comcast by deafult is the number of vunerable XP machines that get hijacked to send spam. Dropping mail from home users has almost no false positives. Mail if permitted by peers would increase the number of botnet attempts to send bulk spam. The fact the mail is blocked makes compromised Comcast user's machines much less valuable.

Even home configured business accounts on static IP addresses do not have a super good IT department to prevent compromised machines becoming part of a spam botnet, which is a good reason to not accept mail from home IP blocks.

I would argue that a more technically accurate term is unnecessary because they would both describe the exact same thing: the breeding and cultivation of a mutated of spring of an existing crop.

Mutations are constantly occurring, even when the organism has evolved to the point where it is no longer in need of additional mutations to continue its existence.

The difference between us manually manipulating a gene and naturally selecting a set of plants with the desired mutations boils down to a level of effort.

For example, we can manipulate the corn genome to make it more likely to produce two ears of corn per plant than 1. Or, we can go through millions of plants until we find a handful that all have that exact same mutation, and breed them together.

The end result is the same, we have a new strain of corn with a specific deviation from it's ancestors that propagates a trait that we find desirable. Whether we hire a handful of scientists to make that change, or hundreds of thousands of undergrads to find the mutation, at the end of the day it's the exact same outcome.

This is also why we now have Roundup-resistant weeds. Plants continue to mutate, and just like the corn that we have modified to be resistant to Roundup, after billions of weeds have been sprayed by roundup, the only ones to survive are those that have a Roundup resistant mutation. Get a couple of those close enough together and next thing you know, you have a new weed that Roundup won't kill. And no one put crab grass under the microscope to make it happen.

We've been doing "selective cross breeding" of completely unrelated organisms for generations. The technical term for it is "hybrid", or when specifically talking about plants "Heterosis". This is why the corn seeds you eat are not the same corn seeds you plan. If you were to plant the hybrid seeds, you would not get the same plant. Similarly, my apple trees cross pollinate between themselves, even between species, resulting in Hawaiian-Honey Crisp hybrids. If I were to plant one of those apple seeds, I would not get a Hawaiian nor a Honey Crisp, I would get some random jumble of combination of genetic traits from both lines. The resulting tree could produce no fruit, or fruit that can't hold up to the local climate, or require more resources, etc...

The more you learn about crop science, biology, and genetics, the less scary the existence of GMO becomes. Now, the business processes, homogenosis, and idiots who don't understand how to efficiently run a farm with minimizing fertilization and herbicide usage are all serious issues that need to be worked on. The general fear of the GMO boogie man though, is just wasted heat from the FUD machine.

-Rick

"No, the vast majority has two: cable (DOCSIS) and telco (DSL)."

Around my place I get to basically chose between Jack and Shit.

Cable, for which there is exactly 1 player in the regional market, ends it service about 1/4 mile down the road. We are ineligible for cable.

We have DSL, for which there is exactly 1 player in the regional market. The best speed they can offer us maxes out at 1.2 Mbps, even though we pay for "up to 6 Mbps".

We can get WiMax from one of two local competitors, it is roughly the same price as our "6 Mbps" DSL service, but maxes out at ~750 Kbps.

We can get Satellite, for about 5 times the price, and to get a 12 Mbps down pipe, but the lag makes it unusable for gaming.

-Rick

They were using GMO crops, the big difference is that they we doing GMO through selective breeding, hybrid seeds, and a whole lot of guess and hope. Instead of what we think of today where we have the gnome of corn mapped and we can work with specific elements of it to intentionally cause the mutations we want to propagate. 100 years ago people worked to do the same thing, finding mutations that resulted in beneficial traits, then finding ways to breed it consistently.

The existence of hybrid seeds far predates any modern concept of genetic manipulation.

Don't get me wrong, Monsanto has some evil as fuck business processes, but they products they create are exceptionally good at increasing yield and farm stability. Same for most of the big ag players.

-Rick