Every US president has sought to expand presidential powers for at least the last 50 years. Overreach is not new.

This is not a good thing, but it is fact. Don't just blame the current and last administration. Blame them all, regardless of party.

Specific intent or being uninformed is no protection from violating someone's patent. The elevator DID violate the patent(s) by selling seed that was viable for planting.

NOTE: I am in no way defending any of the parties involved, just pointing out the facts. This was a terrible USSC decision.

Excellent point. The grain elevator sold him the seeds, which would make them liable for patent infringement.

I don't know if the farmer could go after them, but Monsanto certainly could. They violated the patent(s) by making the sale.

That is indeed one vein of genetic engineering research in plants––to make crop-seed plants sterile, thus locking farmers in to buying seeds every year (as opposed to the millenia-old practice of keeping some seeds from harvest to re-plant the next year).

In the US, Monsanto uses contractual agreements (which farmers/suppliers must sign to buy their seeds) to prevent farmers from saving and replanting.

The idea behind the strategy is to sell such seeds in countries that don't have strong IP or contract law (developing nations). It's a sort of economic enslavement. How would you like it if the people of your country would all starve if Monsanto decided to jack the price of seeds up?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_seeds

Yep. Pretty much the same deal there here in the US (aside from our lack of privacy laws).

We are all now essentially now just GPS-collared "output generators," or whatever the current marketing-speak term is.

Yes, it is scary, but the majority of citizens will not realize it until we have another you-know-who that rises to power somewhere. Or, hey, maybe their insurance rates go up because they have some sort of profile that makes them "high-risk." Oh, wait, that last thing is already happening.

Oh, also, many employers (for years) have run a credit-check on potential hires, or before promoting a current employee. Well, today, many employers are also buying a profile of potential hires/promotees from the data-aggregators (who buy info from cell providers, your bank, CVS, etc.). The troubling thing with this is that, although the credit-agencies have some legal constraints (though not enough), the data-aggregators do not really have any. Their databases are rife with errors and false correlations. There have been documented cases (which I'm too lazy to cite, but search NYT) where people have had several job offers revoked, over a period of months, each for no apparent reason. Y'know, HR Departments do not hire the best-and-brightest, do they?

Dear Troll,

Of course I did not attempt to rebut any of his conclusions. Why would I? They are based on bullshit and over-simplified methods. Therefore, no rebuttal is required. (One should not argue with an idiot, although I am doing just that here, with you.)

My work and funding has absolutely nothing to do with climate, air, global or planetary processes, astronomy, or any other field that might be tangentially related. I work in other fields. But I know bullshit when I smell it.

Wow, that post is just so full of derp, that I am at a loss as to where to begin.

Let's see, paragraph 2, "Correlations are observed, but they do not prove causation... That is, "CO2 and climate temperature change show correlations, but not cause and effect."

Wow. OK, so I downloaded and read the linked PDF article. First-off, it is not published in a peer-reviewed journal, or even as a conference-proceedings article (which are typically not peer-reviewed). It was posted on his blog. Note that his title is "Former Professor," and not "Emeritus Professor" or similar; and at what university? The profile pic on his blog is of a young-ish guy. My gut feeling is that he either didn't make tenure, or, more likely, that he was just an adjunct prof. or lecturer to begin with, and is over-using this association to create a falsely impressive title. Also, this "article" is from 2011, so it's not relevant to this Slashdot thread about 2013 levels of CO2.

Academic dishonesty really pisses me off, so I will note here some of the deficiencies: He uses name-calling and polarizing language in what is purported to be an academic article. In the abstract alone, he says that he uses the "...simplest model possible..." The introduction is laced with more, such as "Physicists have largely abandoned their gadfly role..." He then goes on to call them careerists with no care for truth or science. It is no small wonder that he is clearly an outsider––he doesn't actually do careful studies of phenomena. He's simply a charlatan, and I am wasting my time here to out him as such.

He continues, in the abstract, with, "The double-layer atmosphere model with no free parameters provides:..." Really? His model has no free parameters? That is, it's not a model, but a defined-conclusion (spreadsheet) calculation. He refers to "...the textbook model..." Again, really?!? You claim to be a "former professor" yet you rail against "the textbook model?" What a sad argument to make.

The abstract also includes a line, "All the model predictions robustly follow from the straightforward underlying assumptions without any need for elaborate global circulation models." What?!? Is robustly a word? Your over-simplified model yields the "results" that you were looking for, so you find no need to validate your model? Come on! And what is with the overly complicated language? As Niels Bohr said, "If you can't explain your science to a barmaid, it probably isn't very good science." Or something to that effect.

Continuing, just in the abstract, the author concludes with a significant amount of name-calling (not tolerated in any respectable or even semi-respectable scientific publication): "I conclude with suggested implications regarding warming alarmism, errors by sceptics, research funding, and scientific ignorance regarding climate feedbacks."

Another aspect that sets off the bullshit-alarm of any practicing scientist is his introductory paragraphs. Read it for yourself, if you have time to waste. I am pissed-off that I wasted my time reading any of his crap. I want my time back!

Okay, oh God, what a piece of crap article. I cannot for the life of me get past even the introduction. The derp is just too strong.

Another big bullshit-alarm indicator––overly complicated words and phrases. It's intentionally unreadable in an attempt to cow readers into thinking he's a way-smart guy, whose every word should be trusted.

It's crap. It's complete and utter crap. He goes on in later parts to continue his ad hominem and other attacks. Such things have no place in an objective scientific article.

I want my wasted time back!!!

Ha. Oh, wow.

One little missing "that," and the meaning of the entire sentence changes.

Dear Readers: Scientists don't take sides; we stake out a position and hold it. Also, we are human, just like you.

LOL.

At around 10,000 ppm or so CO2, humans begin to experience respiratory distress. At higher levels, they die.

Sure, they may die while being really high and happy on your potent bud, but they will die.

As I understand biology, all plants (and some algae, etc. that produce chlorophyll) remove CO2 from the atmosphere in the process. So, why is marijuana, in particular, the most prized solution? Sure there's also lotus, peyote, and salvia divinroum, and others, all of which are plants that can get you super-high.

I just don't understand the fixation on marijuana. Are you trying to save the planet by convincing everyone to grow marijuana, in particular, instead of, oh, I don't know jasmine bushes? They smell really awesome

While I think that your overall point regarding ruminants is valuable, I feel obligated to point out (as a scientist), that ammonia absolutely does not contribute to acid rain. Ammonia is a base; the nominal opposite of an acid.

I can't even remember how many angles I have used to try to explain this. Climate-change deniers are completely impossible to convince that the earth is not an infinite system.

This brings to mind my favorite George Orwell quote, from his book, "A Clergyman's Daughter:"

"She came up against it all day long--that vague, blank disbelief so common in illiterate people, against which all argument is powerless."

Sums it up for many contemporary public debates, don't you think?

PeterM: I think $0.25 per page up to a maximum of $5 for an article is pretty reasonable, how about you?

That's much better than the $40 I have paid to read my own articles in an occasional time-pinch.

NYT article about "scientific-article SPAM," which is a related topic:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

It is tough to determine where to publish... It is in part the responsibility of the young publisher (scientist) to know the reputation of the journal(s) to which s/he publishes. Although there has indeed been a flood of brand-new and un-pedigreed online-only journals, it is really up to the researcher to decide where to publish. Indeed, there have existed for many years "vanity journals," and conference-"proceedings" journals, to which aspiring assistant Profs. can contribute, but which have impact factors of less than one.

Conference papers are one thing, but "real" publications are another thing entirely. Web-of-Science tries to explicitly avoid such gray-zone publications mentioned in a recent NYT article, and also, many top-tier journals do not consider "publication" in a conference proceedings to supersede, effectively, public dissemination of a work. That is, it doesn't count.

I can say, from the perspective of an early-career and young CV-builder, that it is very difficult to figure out which journals in one's particular field are preeminent and worthy of submission of good work, but also, which "outlets" are not worthy of disclosure of "new" work or results. To be safe, a lot of us youngsters just stick to APL and JAP, simply because we know that they are (a) reputable with reasonable IFs, and (b) because we know we can get good work published in them. Branching out to other journals is fraught with risks; publication-wise, it is a difficult lottery. But, as the NYT article puts it, and as anyone who has observed, for example, Elsevier's for-profit actions in publishing papers from vanity conferences, one can get just about anything into print, for the right price.

It is a significant risk, however, to publish in one of the new online-only journals. (What happens if they go bankrupt? Can you legally provide reprints?) The very real risk for anyone publishing in a for-profit online-only journal is, well, will your work be accessible in 10 years? 30 years? You grant a journal copyright when you publish, and in return, well, what do you get? Traditionally, you know that your work is in print in many scientific libraries across the world. But with an online-only and for-profit journal, you are granting them the same rights––are you guaranteed that your work will be accessible to all for the foreseeable future? No, you are not. When IP rights are in private control, they can change hands, at any time, as upon sale.

Long story short––The existing model of non-profits owning copyrights to half of scientists' work is the standard (odious as that may be), but, a move to for-profit and online-only journals will only exacerbate the situation. Your life's work could end up inaccessible to anyone, if a for-profit enterprise (like Elsevier) decides that making-available of copies of your work is not profitable. Remember, you grant the journal copyright... That is where these online-only, and for-profit journals are headed. This sort of thing has happened over and over again in the past, under copyright, with movies, scripts, musical recordings, etc. Do you want to put science under the same yoke of private ownership of dissemination?

Ask yourself: Should my work be made available for only 5 years? Or should it be made available in perpetuity to the readers of the journal to which I submit my work? Really, how valuable is your contribution? If in 50 years, there is someone with a question that can be answered by your work, should it not be available? (This is not fantasy. For example, space groups were fully developed 40 years before x-ray diffraction allowed the interpretation of crystal structures of materials based on diffraction-pattern symmetries.)

Do you want your discoveries either locked up in copyright limbo, or lost in a region of cyberspace gone fallow? No. Science is a progression, and should not be stunted by any potential lack of accessibility, short-term or long.

That is, OP, just agreeing with you that it's a problem, but one that hasn't found a solution yet.

Without a warrant or similar judge-issued order, that is.