It would be a crime against humanity, if it were true, and if farmers were forced to use Monsanto seeds.

In fact, Monsanto do not make sterile seeds.

In fact, farmers buy Monsanto seeds because they think they generate the best return on their investment.

In fact, almost all non-GM seed sold in the world is only good for the first generation and has to be re-bought each year because the highest yielding non-GM crops are first generation hybrids which don't retain their vigorous characteristics in the second generation.

And your point about the free market makes no sense in this context. If Monsanto did sell sterile seeds, farmers wouldn't buy them (unless they were worth it), and the market would either force them to stop selling sterile seeds or go out of business.

This is one of the most misinformed comments I have ever seen on /.

You clearly have no knowledge whatsoever about the Indian farmer suicide problem, which began years before Monsanto started selling GM seed in India, and is absolutely nothing to do with the company. The suicides are, according to most analyses I've seen, usually linked closely with widespread crop failures which follow monsoon drought seasons. It's a climate problem, not a Monsanto problem.

And farmer suicide being the #2 killer in India? That's so stupid it hurts to read. If you check the WHO mortality data, you'll find non-communicable diseases and infectious diseases account for 9/10 of the top ten causes of death, with accidental injury being the 10th.

Finally, patents do last for 20 years in the USA! Not 100 years.

Please, in future, try not to comment until you have the slightest clue what you're talking about.

That's not what happened at all. They didn't force her to take down her website, they just told her she couldn't bring her camera to school. Still a stupid move, but not the same as what you are alleging.

I didn't say anything about democracy, just that creationists are not the sensible fraction. But since you mention it, the USA isn't a direct democracy; it doesn't necessarily have to enact the majority opinion on everything.

Yes, because the 21% are the sensible ones.

That doesn't tell you much about the demographics involved.

Those 1,024 adults could have been somewhat self-selected. What kind of person answers the telephone without first confirming who the call is from, then proceeds to answer a bunch of inane questions? A person stupid enough to believe in creationism, that's who.

You're confusing evolution with natural selection. Natural selection is just one mechanism by which evolution can occur.

It's worth pointing out that it's not just human genomes which will be cheap. I'm excited about the applications this has in biology at large. If sequencing costs continue dropping at anything like their current rate of decrease, whole genome sequencing will soon be opened up to all sorts of interested parties. That has huge implications for taxonomy and phylogenetics, conservation, crop breeding and plant science as a whole.

If genome sequencing costs drop, that means other types of sequencing costs drop too. For example RNA-Seq, which lets us see which genes are currently active at a given point in time, in a sample from an organism. Things which are currently conceptually possible but prohibitively expensive, such as comparing the active genes across hundreds or thousands or species in a particular state, or across a species in hundreds of different environmental conditions, will become possible. Our understanding of life processes will deepen by an order of magnitude, with inevitable benefits in biotech, medicine and agriculture.

Well, since Bacillus thuringiensis is an acceptable organic pesticide, used by spraying the bacteria directly onto the leaf surfaces, you would expect some organic foods to still have traces.

I also use Witopia from the UK. It has about 30 different servers you can connect to in different cities around the world - I use it all day to listen to Pandora and occasionally watch Hulu. Also good for watching the BBC from abroad and watching Japanese channels from the UK.

Excellent service all-round - high speeds and a choice of four VPN protocols.

The math in the first part is correct. Multiplying by six factorial accounts for the fact that you can guess the numbers in any order.

However, the math in the second part is stupid - obviously the probability isn't cumulative. I was wrong about that. Perhaps it really is a math tax.

I don't know about the US lotteries, but the UK national lottery allows you to pick 6 numbers from 1 to 49. The probability of picking the same 6 numbers on any given ticket can be calculated as follows: ...you start with 49 numbers to choose from, and the pool gets smaller by one for each number you choose. The probability of choosing any number correctly is 1/the size of the pool. The probability of getting all the numbers is the probability of getting each number multiplied: 1/49 x 1/48 x 1/47 x 1/46 x 1/45 x 1/44 = 1/10068347520 ...multiplied by the number of different ways of arranging the 6 numbers (since they can be in any order): 6! = 720. ...so the final probability: 1/10068347520 x 720 = 13983816.

Then if you play every week, spending say £10 on 10 tickets a week, you're buying 520 tickets a year. If you play for 20 years, that's 10,400 tickets. So the probability of winning the jackpot once over those 20 years is 1/1345. With a payout of around £25 million, i.e. enough to catapult even a shared winner into a life of extreme comfort, that's not such an unreasonable way to put your money away.

Contrast this scheme to just saving the £10 a week for 20 years. At a generous 5% interest you could accumulate around £16,500 depending on how your interest is calculated. £16,500 is never going to improve someones life massively. Suddenly playing the lottery, especially if you have few other potential routes for enrichment, but you do have a steady, low income, is a pretty reasonable way of giving yourself hope of a much better life.

...and that we only have tens, instead of thousands of gunshot wounds in the UK every year.

It's a company who provide lots of cool shit for the web as part of their business model. People like them because they let us exchange what used to be a worthless commodity (our personal data) for real services. They are much more than an ad network, to the point where it's stupid to call them that. They changed the face of the internet, continue to provide great services, and we don't have to give them any money. We are geeks, we think about it and *then* love them.

The lesson to take from this is: don't store valuable information on your thermostat.