You're not wrong. Sci-Hub is in violation of the law, no doubt about that. Morally though, I absolutely could not care less, and think that what is really wrong is hoarding knowledge in the form of the tax payer funded publications which Sci-Hub is now making accessible for all.

I hope the Sci-Hub founder that Elsevier is after is never extradited. What she's doing is making the world a better place.

I still do not believe what Sci-Hub does is legitimately piracy. Piracy is downloading something you did not pay for. If my tax dollars already paid for the institutional overhead, the scientist's salary, and the grant money, downloading the paper is merely getting what I am owed. Those who monetize science are the real pirates, demanding money for access to that which was created with our tax dollars, charging universities obscene fees for the privilege of allowing their students to read it, and denying scientists and students in poorer countries access to important research.

I've had issues getting papers from the 50's thanks to this outrageous copyright business...the publishers claim to somehow be of benefit to science, and that Sci-Hub harms science, but tell me, how does that benefit science, and how does allowing me or anyone else harm it?

Copyright be damned, suing them is like suing a cop who returns stolen property because it cuts into the thief's profits. I'm a scientist, and I say long live Sci-Hub.

There's a difference between telling and labeling. I work in the area of crop improvement, and like most in a specialized scientific field, I want people to know more about what I do, not less. What is genetically engineered? Corn, soy, cotton, canola, alfalfa, sugar beet, papaya, summer squash, with apple & potato available in limited amounts, with traits including insect resistance, herbicide tolerance, drought loss mitigation, virus resistance, and consumer oriented traits. If I did not want people to know this, why would I so readily say it?

It is not knowledge I am against, it is the selective reporting of that knowledge, out of context, with no essential background information, doing nothing in the face of massive disinformation campaigns. Surely you can agree that selective reporting is deceptive, no? I listed one such example. As I've said before, nothing else is labeled, why GE? Ever seen a watermelon labeled as a triploid, an apple labeled as a bud sport, or a tomato labeled as being the product of embryo rescue techniques? Me neither, yet people eat them every day. Start there and I might believe the push for GE labeling has anything to do with education, not just the advancement of fear. Again, you ignored the question of why label only on thing.

Besides all that, if someone wants to know if food is GE, it takes about five minutes on Google. If you really care about this yet can't be bothered to educate yourself on your own beliefs, I don't see how anyone can demand a special labeling law. It's like demanding a law saying that bacon has to be marked as non-Kosher, in case anyone wanting to keep Kosher is too lazy to find out if bacon is acceptable to their religion.

You claim to not be singling out GE crops, yet you make no mention of labeling for anything else. Therefore, you clearly are, unless you would also like crops to be labeled if they were produced through techniques such as somaclonal variation, ploidy manipulation, mass selection methods, ect. You dodged every hard question.

If you label GE crops, but fail to give proper context, giving only enough information of misconceptions to spread, that is deceptive. It's like the textbooks saying evolution is only a theory; technically true, but also clearly lying. GMO labels are lies of omission.

Fine, start from there. But the moment you deny the scientific consensus which says that GE crops are safe and benefitial, you've careened right into conspiratorial nonsense.

As for patenting, I suppose you would exhibit the same distrust of conventionally bred crops, which have also long been patented? Even if we do take this to be a good point, it applies to far more than GE crops. I suppose you re willing to pay the salary of the breeders who make your food supply possible then? From where I'm standing, the system works pretty well. You develop something, get a patent for a limited time to prevent someone from mass producing your hard work without having put in the possibly substantial investment of time, money, and energy, and then the patent expires. Where is the unfairness there? Ever eaten a Honeycrisp apple? It used to be patented, until the patent expired. Monsanto's first generation of genetically engineered soybean is off patent; you can literally buy 50 lb bags of generic GE soybean at Rural King now. And even if you just hate those big corporations for whatever reason, what of smaller plant breeders? Ever had a pluot, aprium, or pluerry? What of something like Zaiger's Genetics, who develops them? Should they just work for years and years on something, only to have someone bigger come along, buy one of their trees, and mass produce them, leaving Zaiger's with the bill? Without patents on their pluots, what do they do?

Why? Why single out GE crops for labeling? It can't be about consumer information, considering how readily available that information is, and that you do not make similar demands of crops produced through grafting, crops produced through induced mutagenesis, crops produced through wide crossing, crops produced through embryo rescue, or any other crop improvement technique.

In short, the objections you raise, while popular, do not have merit.

You are, perhaps willfully, ignoring the dozens of public universities working with GE crops. The University of Hawai'i's Rainbow papaya, Virginia Tech's Blight Blocker peanut, Texas A&M's HLB resistant citrus, Kansas State's biofortified tomato, to name a few. If there was not such strong opposition, more of those could make it to the market. Even then, no one said blindly trust anyone. Do you also think that vaccines are bad because of pharmacutical companies?

Your post is deeply intolerant of my fervent belief that all people are entitled to the right of free speech.

If you truly believe what you say, you will have your intolerant post removed.

Else, you do not truly practice what you preach and likely just assume you will always be on the right side of the censor.

Last I checked, Germany loved Merkel and all she's done, or at least, a large portion of them do. That's the kicker...they want censorship. They don't seem to see the hypocrisy of using speech to advocate against free speech, but as far as I can tell, this is being met with applause.

Damn it, that was supposed to be First Amendment. I mean, Second too, but not the relevant one.

Both your and OP's analogies fail to consider the vast scale. Maybe a better analogy would be to say you have millions of windows popping up everyday. Some may have wrongthink on them. You are expected to know where and when the wrongthink will occur on a window, or else you are also guilty of thought crime by virtue of ignorance.

Somehow, this is considered something other than madness, despite not just the inherent immorality and hypocrisy of censorship, but also the sheer impracticality of the matter. I sure as shit don't see Germany stepping up to propose how social media filters for latent thought crime.

Either way, the US may have a flaming dumpster full of faults, but I'm at least glad we have the Second Amendment.

Censorship is freedom, eh? Sounds like something I've heard before in a cautionary tale.

Enforce censorship or Putin wins? Bloody hell, I hope that's not mainstream thought anywhere.

Making it cheaper doesn't necessarily have to decrease quality. Whole Foods is heavily invested in the organic, non-GMO nonsense, which raises costs at negligible benefit. I'd love to see them switch their focus to quality exclusively, and and drop the catering to scientific illiteracy. Might be able to lower costs and increase quality that way if they act more like Wegmans.

This post is the exact type of misinformation I'm taking about. GE crops aren't made to be 'drenched in' Round-Up, they're designed to tolerate it so it can be used in place of other weed control methods, which typically include a series of much worse herbicides.

Yes, there were potatoes that were engineered to produce a type of insecticide, They were called NewLeaf, and are no longer on the market. But you know what, all potatoes produce their own insecticides, notably solanine. If you want potatoes with no insecticides, you beter not eat any plants, because chemical defenses are how they evolved to cope with pests. Don't like that being altered? What do you think happens when we breed a new pest resistant variety without genetic engineering?

As for cross pollination, all plants do that. Reproduction is what life has been fine tuned to do since day one. If you are going to hold GE crops to an unreasonable double standard, then of course they're going to fail. But I could apply that same argument to non-GE crops. Crops with different traits will cross pollinate and result in different progeny, which can cause issues in some instances. Arbitrarily declaring one thing be grown in greenhouses while giving everything else a free pass makes no sense.

Your post shows exactly why I hate anti-GMO marketing so much. It preys on an ignorance of modern agricultural methods, genetics, and basic botany, all while fostering opposition to a technology that society should be embracing.

I have the same problem. The longer Firefox stays open, the more memory it uses. It uses way more memory than the amount it should be. A handful of pages do not need 2 gigs of memory, yet somehow, Firefox demands it. It used to run so well. Now it's a bloated monstrosity. I only use it for the NoScript. Once Chrome has a whitelist system as nice as the one Firefox has, then I won't see any reason at all to put up with Firefox's bloat.