Just an aside, you cannot legally cross the US/Canadian border with your GMRS radios or travel to a lot of countries. GMRS here in Canada is limited to 2 watts and integrated crappy antenna. My 5watt ham HT can go to most countries and, with a roll-up j-pole strung up in a tree, can probably transmit 100x as far as my GMRS radio.

To anyone reading the above: yes ham has it's version of a "troll." They are these guys who think they work for the FCC and know what amateur radio is "for." Fortunately, the folks on the airwaves are generally the nicest and most helpful people you will ever talk to. These guys, like most other trolls, are more common on Internet forums and are full of it. Amateur radio has been so successful at spurring innovation because it is simply defined by what it is not (commercial radio), and not for some preordained purpose.

<sarcasm>I guess I should get on the repeater tomorrow at 8am when those old timers are "ragchewing" again. That repeater is for "contributing" (whatever that means), not replacing IRC chat </sarcasm>

That works great unless you have a small effect size, large population variance, and large samples are prohibitive, perhaps because they require flying airliners...

The issue seems to be that either apoc.famine doesn't understand statistics or that the variance of the population is too large. If the effect of seeding is small, and the population variance of clouds is very large, it may require very large sample sizes to test for significance between randomly sampled groups. Remember, each sample requires flying an airliner, so large sample sizes may be prohibitive.

In the past, food additives have been developed primarily to lower cost often at the expense of quality. The only problem I have with these new technologies is that they could be used to make a firm red, yet rotten tomatoes. I love the technology, but don't trust the people wielding it.

That's great for playing a DVD, but absolutely sucks for a complicated task. I see people spending hours clicking around menu-driven software (eg., SPSS, EPrime, Excel) trying to get something to work because they have been trained to never look at documentation (and be afraid of anything that requires typing). /rant

Or replacing or modifying the search results...

Hypocrite? perhaps there is more than one person voicing an opinion on this website?

Even if there was a site "requiring" Firefox, A) it would probably still work somewhat effectively on other browsers, and B) Firefox is available on many, many more platforms than Flash, often distributed by the OS vendor.

Of course, the thousands of people who spent the prior 50 years developing the *methodologies* that he used, will be locked out of synthetic life until their children are middle aged. Despite romantic ideas, invention is not a solitary operation. He may have been the first to the finish line using "shitloads of money," but patents will do nothing but slow down progress. The world will start working with synthetic life in a quarter century, whereas without Venter and patents, the we would have synthetic life in <5 (at the rate of progress in molecular biology).