Anonymous, if you're correct, then biopiracy IS illegal already, isn't it? In which case, something doesn't compute.

I just want to say that reading these letters makes me feel rather grateful that I never had any luck with the Salon Personals.

TheSunGod, that was quite a piece of work: you criticize an interviewer for not soft-gloving the Hamas, Salon for publishing the interview, and then have the unmitigated gall to accuse everyone else of trying to stifle your point of view? Look in the mirror some time.

" Newsflash: there are even attractive women who love sex, and can't get it whenever they want it."

Name one. And give me her number. ;)

Anybody who claims that statistics can't lie obviously has no understanding of how statistics are used. I recommend a small book called "How to Lie With Statistics". The related claim that statistics accurately represent a norm is absurd on the very face of it: any situation with a statistic other than 100% is proof positive that there is no meaningful norm, only variance.

Generalizing off of statistics in the neighborhood of 25%-40% is, at the very least, a dire insult to 25% of the population. More commonly, though, any interpretation of the numbers is not "fact" at all, but just speculation based on figures without stories.

It is an indisputable fact that when a novel substance is developed (and that means that the substance never existed before), the exact consequences - including life or death - of placing that substance in a living creature is simply not known.

Now, there are a lot of things we can know. For one, we can tell whether it will cause a fever. We can tell whether it'll set off any of several hundred cell-receptors. And we can and do test every novel substance against every known cause of toxicity long before even considering placing it in living tissue. Always, with every substance, every time.

This means that every substance which goes into animal testing (in vivo) has already passed every non-living (in vitro) test that the entire scientific community has ever been able to figure out. And, frankly, it can be done in a matter of hours, since all the tests can be - and often are - run in parallel. Wouldn't it be great if we could do ALL the testing a new drug needs in a matter of hours without using any living beings? Heh, the pharmaceutical haters would really throw a fit then - they'd get the entire patent period to monopolize! But the simple reality is, we're not there yet. We're not even close.

There is not a single medical research company in the entire world that wouldn't love to get rid of animal testing. It's inconvenient, it's messy, it's unpleasant, and yes, it's protested, and frankly it doesn't even always work (no two animals are identical, and no animal is a perfect model for people). And on top of all that, it's extremely expensive.

Did you catch that last one? Expensive? Do you really think these companies want to do something obscenely expensive? Heck no. Hopefully it's going to end. And it's not going to be the violent thugs of SHAC or ELF that end it, or in any way contribute to ending it; all they're accomplishing is making it take longer. No, it's going to be us computer engineers who finally bring biology to its knees through massive application of processing power. We get up each day and work towards modeling biological systems - mostly just simple proteins so far - and if there's ever going to be an end to this system, that's where it's going to come from.

Those of us working to make this world a better place for all its inhabitants have absolutely no tolerance for those of you whose behavior is limited to terrorizing people for no gain and spreading opinions rooted in total ignorance.

(Full disclosure: I work for a biotech services company with a wide suite of products. We work directly on creating in vitro tests that replace animal testing.)

I consider freedom of religion and freedom of speech to be basic human rights. However, as we're seeing here, they're not always compatible. In all such cases, one person's rights end where another person's rights begin.

Which is to say, that a Muslim's right to freedom of religion does not give them any right to end somebody else's freedom of speech - nor any other freedoms. To the extent which fundamentalist Islam (or fundamentalist Christianity, or any other religion or -ism) cannot be stretched to include basic human rights, there can be no tolerance for it.

Tolerance must always be FOR human rights, and never used AGAINST them.

So, is this our future? Warm, rising oceans, strip-mined forests, and pyloned mountains?

So, how do these Boehner/Abramoff contacts compare to Abramoff's contacts with, say, every other member of congress? Isolated factoids in a tangled web don't help much, I'm afraid.

Doesn't it bother anybody else that Bush's entire legal justification can be summed up as "I'm functionally a dictator"?

" The piece mentioned that extracting oil from oil sands and shale is "energy intensive". The rub is where that energy will come from - largely natural gas."

Okay, that's fine for starting up, but if the extraction process can't produce enough oil to power its own operations, it isn't going to go anywhere.

How about you look it up? What one tax bracket got a higher percentage decrease than any other? Go look that up and report back.