You're responding to the summary. The article at ScienceNews has a different flavor.

This hypothesis builds on a previous idea that, after disease-resistant Europeans met native populations, diseases spread throughout the New World in simultaneous epidemics. There is evidence for this, including a pattern of entire New World civilizations, far inland from where Europeans settled, collapsing within a generation of their earliest arrivals. For a comparison, the Plague in Europe is known to have killed between 30% and 60% of the European population, and this is thought to have been much worse.

As the native population dropped, so too did the demand for food and consequently arable land, and as a result there was an abrupt decrease in slash-and-burn clearing of forests. The hypothesis here is that the resulting re-forestation sucked CO2 out of the air and caused cooling.

One of the confusing things about this article is that it doesn't fit the popular narrative, and "good" and "bad" are all mixed up. First, the major culprit here is not European guns -- though they effected terrible things later in history -- but European germs, for which Europeans themselves are not responsible per-se, so "good" and "bad" are complicated here. Second, we usually think of reforestation and CO2 sequestration as a "good" thing, yet here it caused too much cooling (for human populations in Europe). And finally, we usually think of Native Americans as being stewards of forests, and Europeans as being their destroyers, yet here, inadvertently, it was Europeans who caused the forests. You see how none of this matches the popular narrative?

I did a little digging on this subject, because the picture painted by the article you cited contained some confusing conclusions, which seem to stem from misunderstanding the sources they cite (see the footnotes at the bottom of the salem-news article). At the end of this digging, I shared some of the article's concerns, but for different reasons.

Yes, it does appear that a company called Epicyte is producing a variety of corn that contains antibodies that latch onto sperm. The leap was the conclusion that people would become infertile by eating the corn. That seems not to be the case. Rather, the corn is used to produce a topical spermicide. The motivation is presumably that a gel containing antibodies that specifically and only target sperm will cause fewer problems than today's more toxic chemical spermicides, which cause irritation of the skin and mucous membranes. The corn here is grown not as a food crop, but as a pharmaceutical crop that is processed to produce the spermicide.

I do understand that there are two causes for concern here. The first is that, unless the modified corn is grown under extremely strict conditions, there is the probability that it will cross-pollinate with other corn, and the gene will escape into the wild. In that way, it could find its way into food crops. The second is the concern raised by the Slashdot article here that food rNA can enter the bloodstream. Put together, these do raise the possibility that these genes could accidentally get into women's bloodstreams, where it seems conceivable that it could cause them to produce some of these antibodies. The causal chain is not nearly so direct as is implied by the salem-news article (one gets the feeling that any degree of truth to it got there by accident), but it is enough to cause some legitimate concern.

If the rNA responsible for producing these antibodies did enter women's bloodstreams in this way, one wonders what the effect would be. Presumably, if it does cause infertility, the effect would be short-lived, because rNA in the blood doesn't last long (or, this is my understanding, at any rate). If this is the case, if the infertility effect is strong enough, and if this rNA can be produced in a way that doesn't cause it to accdentally enter food crops, then this would actually be a wonderful thing, because we need good alternatives to hormonal birth control; it can be pretty hard on women's bodies. But those are a lot of "if"s.

The second leap in the article was the confusion of that genetically-modified corn with other strains of genetically-modified corn, which are intended to be higher-yield (e.g., pesticide-resistant, etc), that are being pushed in Africa. I do believe that there is something sinister about this, but it is not some plot to quietly sterilize Africans. Rather, because this corn does not produce viable seeds, farmers are made dependent on Monsanto et al for seeds each year. I also view the overuse of pesticide encouraged by these crops to be bad thing. But they're not feeding contraceptive corn to people.

I wish there were more critical articles by real experts on issues like this. Too often, it feels like everyone is either a well-intentioned but ignorant hippy, or a willfully-blind corporate shill, and we're left to sort through the half-truths.

That's what I thought too. Have they heard of Ivan Pavlov?

Plus, forget about mistreating animals; there's already enough porn in which women are degraded and abused.

Having now read TFA (always a good policy), it looks like a Flash exploit was involved. Maybe the Flash applet was embedded using OLE?

How do you own someone with an XLS file nowadays?!

(I'm assuming, "How dangerous can it be? It's not an executable!" is exactly what the hapless employee who opened it was thinking too...)

Do you have a specific example? It's nice to learn from others' mistakes...

That word does not mean what you think it means.

The summary uses the phrase, "Perusing through the documents." First off, you don't "peruse through" a document; you simply "peruse" it. Secondly, the use of "through" implies that the author has used "peruse" as a substitute for "skim" -- because you can "skim through" documents -- and this is doubly wrong, because "peruse" has exactly the opposite meaning from "skim;" it means "to read through with thoroughness or care." You'd peruse a legal document. You probably wouldn't peruse a magazine.

It also may sound like I'm being a dirty proscriptivist here, but that's not the point. "Improper" grammar can be ok so long as it communicates unambiguously. The problem with "peruse" is that, if half the population thinks it means one thing, and the other half thinks it means exactly the opposite, then the word is useless. It's so commonly misused that I avoid it altogether; even if I use it correctly, about half my readers will misunderstand me.

Earlier GNOMES and KDEs imitated Windows. One thing Windows did right was the Taskbar. It is, in all seriousness, an extremely good metaphor. It separates the acts of launching programs from managing which ones are running, because, dammit, those are different things.

OSX, with its Dock, conflates launching a program with looking at a window that it has opened. The implicit metaphor is that all programs are always "running," and that the messy details of actually starting a process should be wrapped up by the operating system so that we don't need to think about it. Then, multitasking within a program falls to the program itself. Everybody ends up implementing their own tabs.

Android does the same thing as OSX. All "apps" are always "running," more-or-less, from a GUI point of view. Under-the-hood, they obviously are not; they have to restore themselves from saved state. But this varies from program to program, and is one of the reasons Android has an inconsistent user experience. Given an unfamiliar program, you don't know at first when you're quitting it, and when you're leaving it running in the background.

Now, Gnome3 appears also to falling into the OSX camp.

What Torvalds seems to prefer, in KDE3.5, Gnome2, and now XFCE, is a more Windows-like metaphor for multitasking. I'm with him. I think that's one thing Windows did right.

Personally, I think KDE 3.5 was the height of full-featured Linux desktop environments, and it's degraded into so much juvenile bullshit ever since. Now, just give me something lightweight that uses a reasonable multitasking paradigm and gets out of the way. XFCE fits the bill.

Indeed, the summary makes it sounds like "SLAM" is the name of a piece of software developed by NASA, when really it's a generic acronym describing an entire field of research. Terrible summary.

(And the Kalman filter is so overhyped and misunderstood, it has begun to get on my nerves. It's Bayes Rule for the special case of a linear system and Gaussian probability densities, applied over and over. That's it. People get so wrapped up in its "optimality" that they forget what it actually is. I wonder, how many people even bother to actually use empirically-measured noise covariances in their Kalman filters (in which case, what is its optimality worth?)).

I think it'd just be a motor with a feedback loop to keep the back-emf (and hence the speed) constant, used to drive the hands. Or an analog oscillator with a "tick" circuit, though now you almost have a digital watch (is the LM555 an analog or a digital IC? A little of both...). But then, true mechanical watches, with their escapement mechanisms, seem almost "digital" in this respect as well. And if you're going to go through that trouble, why not use a quartz crystal (at which point you've arrived at a Timex). I imagine there are thousands of amusing ways to build a (probably not very precise) watch.

Nah, steampunk is a faux-Victorian genre loved almost exclusively by the irredeemably nerdy. This, like the straight-razor comeback, is more "Mad Men" '60s (or even '40s) nostalgia; it's people borrowing symbols from a time when "men were men" -- a way for men to assert their masculinity in a way that they see as intelligent and sophisticated, rather than uncultured or brutish. Since, for a while in the 90s, the latter seemed to be the only conception of masculinity being promulgated, I appreciate the trend, albeit with reservations.

More like, a GPU is a freight train moving at 15 MPH, a CPU is a Ferarri doing 120MPH, and you need to transport a warehouse of boxes across country.

You'd think Java would be filling this role, but it isn't.

On Windows, Sumatra is the fastest, and by far the best for use with pdflatex. Its printing is poor, so on those occasions when you actually want to print a PDF you probably want Foxit.

...and 1947 turns the dial on its rotary phone to call both '92 and '84:

From here:

In other words...

(Cyber = steering/adjustment/feedback) + (net = networks/interconnection) + (ics = study of)