The issue here is not whether all genetic modification is safe, it is about the misleading reporting of a scientific article. The scientific community do have ethical concerns about safety, which is why such studies are performed in the first place.

In this particular instance, they were screening for toxins that could be produced in error by a sequence. In the particular gene they were looking at (one commonly used to promote expression of proteins for another inserted gene), they couldn't find any. This doesn't automatically make it safe, but it rules out a set of potential issues.

And remember, such allergens/toxins can be produced in non-modified organisms, which is why we even know about them in the first place.

Have you read the Pirate Party's submission regarding copyright review, or their submission regarding patent reform? Do you have specific points of disagreement other than just implying that it is not sensible?

Canberra. No one knows why anyone would want to live there.

Are you really claiming that a computer being run by Los Alamos and called Trinity is primarily going to be used for alternative energy?

Exactly; the only Skype API that is "open" is the scripting interface to the proprietary client software; not to the Skype network itself.

Psychological comfort. Because it is nice to know that you weren't just being paranoid when you go to the trouble to reinstall everything.

Many language varieties in China would be seen by linguists as distinct. Compare putonghua or guangzhou hua with holooe. Whether you call these 'dialects' or 'languages' or fangyan depends on how you define the term 'language'.

While it is true that some spoken variants of English are quite difficult for other English speakers to understand (such as Black Country English, or the Glasgow Patter), there's not the linguistic range that you would find between the Chinese languages/dialects. Most English varieties are mutually intelligible, and differ primarily in pronunciation and a few words.

Interestingly, the Switzerland firearm-related deaths per capita are not that much lower than for the United States. The firearm related suicide rate is roughly the same. But the firearm-related homicide rate for the United States is significantly higher. Interpret that how you will.

And of course you need to consider other risks, not just theft. If the place catches fire, you may not be able to get out of the window.

The aim here is not to shield a single individual from government intercept, but to protect the wider community from wholesale surveillance by the state.

The latter requires simply that strong encryption becomes defacto, as part of email, as part of browsing the web, as part of all communication. The primary difficulties are not around message encryption (for example, many people use Skype, which is encrypted by default), but the decentralization of keys in a way that is usable en masse.

Assymetric cryptography is used for key exchange in transport layer security. So this protects you from man-in-the-middle attacks, since the private key is never transmitted (and the session keys are encrypted), at least in an ideal world where implementations are perfect.

The real structural issue is the chain of trust; the certificate authorities are rather more centralized than is healthy. But subverting these involves more than just sitting in the middle of the network.

for the maze effect, you need an old fashioned micro with a character size so small (eg 8 pixels square) that the slash characters were forced to go from one corner to the opposite just to make them legible...

A4 size
at least 150dpi
daylight readable
a day or more battery life
robust but light
able to take annotations
minimal DRM sillyness
quick page turns

C does indeed do type checking; the issue here is that there are a number of implicit conversions (coercions) defined by the language.

You can enable warnings in many compilers that will flag potential problems caused by such coercions (for example, '-Wconversion' in gcc).

... and in this case, sent with a one time pigeon