Squiddles
You as a consumer will not ever buy GMO seeds, accidentally or intentionally. Because the genome is a protected product, farms who buy GMO seeds from companies like Bayer (formerly Monsanto) have to enter into a legal agreement with the seed supplier, and they buy massive quantities at a time. Many public seed companies proudly declare their seeds are non-GMO, but that’s true of all seeds you’d be purchasing.
The seedless plants that you as a consumer can buy are bred by creating a sterile hybrid between two non-sterile lineages. It’s essentially a “defect” in the children of the two lineages which prevents their progeny from developing seeds even though they still develop fruit.
Edit to answer the rest of your questions:
Legal to use biological waste: Use freely.
How the patents work: Patented plants are basically just a legal protection for the company that produces the seeds you’re buying. They’ve put a lot of work into generating lineages of pepper plants which can be cross-bred to produce seedless peppers, and their patent ensures that they are the only legal supplier of these plants (these specific plants–someone else could breed separate lineages and patent their plants without any issue). The USDA website and US Patent and Trademark Office website have more information, but I’ll summarize: You could be sued if you bought their patented seeds, grew pepper plants from those seeds, then created a business to propagate and sell those pepper plants. You, at home, growing food for you and your family/friends? No one cares. The patent only exists to prevent another company from taking the plant that the original company painstakingly bred and selling it as their own.
Implications for society: You can’t build a business selling their patented plants without a licensing agreement, I guess. Nothing odious about hybrids, and protecting specially-bred plants is enshrined in the Plant Patent Act of 1930, so it’s been around a long long time.
Finally something I’m actually qualified to weigh in on! I’m the lead UI developer for an EHR software (not saying which one or getting into details–it’d be pretty easy to figure out my identity).
First, to be fair, it’s possible that the software they’re using is genuinely terrible. They don’t say which EHR. I’ve heard this kind of thing from providers before, though, and it’s usually that they don’t know how to use the software. From the way the article describes the provider, it sounds like they’re stuck in paper and don’t want to learn a new way of doing things. On the one hand, fair enough–patient care should be their primary concern. On the other hand, patient care is so much easier, faster, and more accurate in an EHR.
In my EHR you select a patient and can get a full visit summary on any visit the patient has ever had with a couple of mouse clicks. Immunizations, clinical notes, radiology, goals, problems, vitals, education–everything that happened during the visit. There are built-in tools for reminders that automatically notify you of things that are important for the visit based on previous visits, contraindication checks for medications, tracking of fluid balance, integrated documentation for clinical reference and distributing to patients, etc, etc.
That’s not even to mention things like compliance for clinical quality measure reporting, integrating with state immunization registries, easy export of data to external facilities (eg, CCDA), using digital signatures for non-repudiation of controlled substance prescriptions, automagically pinging requests and data around to the different departments, etc. So many things that used to rely on a human squinting at a paper now just happen, with a built-in audit trail.
As for billing: we (developers, testers, and project/product managers) HATE billing. It’s a necessary evil, but we package it off as a separate plugin. It can pull procedure codes and the like from the database to do its job, but to suggest that billing is the only reason to use an electronic health record is astoundingly ignorant. Patient care is the primary concern of everyone who actually has hands on the application. Most of us are former providers who just happen to be alright at coding.
Access to Contacts has to go through the Android API, which means the user has to explicitly grant permission for Discord to access that specific functionality. That’s what the comment you’re replying to meant: access to contacts is protected at the operating system level and they’ve seen the source code on the OS side. Permissions might have been granted by the user reflexively, just muscle memory, when setting up Discord, but it absolutely had to have happened if Sync Contacts was enabled. Unless there’s some kind of bug where Discord enables the in-app setting without actually having the permissions to access contacts–I guess that could be possible. It couldn’t actually see any contact info in that instance, but it would try. If I go into Discord settings and try to enable the Sync Contacts option my phone displays the built-in Android permissions prompt with the text “Allow Discord to access your contacts?”
Congrats on the kiddo! We called this phase “the worm of obligation”.
My kid is five years old, and it’s absolutely my favorite phase so far. I can play imagination games and video games with them (Goat Simulator is the current favorite) and have great conversations. They’re wicked smart, empathetic and caring, a great hiking buddy, and their vocabulary is stunning. Seeing the dots connect and the excitement in their voice when they realize how something works is absolutely magical!
I know my experience isn’t typical, but I wanted to slip in some advice. Parents can’t help it. Until about six months ago my kid had some gnarly emotional control issues that they were in therapies for. We joked that their motto was “no, and fuck you for asking”, and it was honestly the saddest and most brutal four years of my life. I had expectations for the experiences I would share with them, and they just couldn’t play the part I imagined. Their sensory needs are the exact opposite of mine, and it was very difficult to work around. My core advice would be to be flexible. It’s great to dream of how you’ll play with them, but understand that the kinds of interactions that are joyful depends entirely on her. Don’t be too invested in any particular activity–just look for opportunities to connect and play, even if it’s not a game you enjoy. And stick with it. Some phases are just terrible, and it feels like it will never end. It can take months or years of gentle correction before a concept/rule sets in, and the temptation will be there to escalate negative reinforcement (being a parent gave me great insight into hamsters), but one day, with no apparent trigger, the lights flip on in some new brain region and they suddenly get it. Your biggest responsibility is to build a relationship and trust, not make them behave perfectly. They don’t implicitly understand or care about arbitrary rules like “no climbing on the counters”, or “don’t put things in the cat”.
My advice comes from my own experience, so it may not apply well to your kid. Actually, that’s a good perspective for any parenting advice–you’ll be the only expert in your kid. Take advice into consideration, but discard what doesn’t apply to her specifically. A lot of parenting advice comes from “I tried X thing at the same time that the behavior happened to change” and a lot of the time what the parent was doing when the change happened was a coincidence (see B.F. Skinner’s superstitious pigeons). Engage in good faith, be flexible, advocate for them, ask for help when you need it. Some things just won’t happen until her brain is at a certain point of development, so support where she is in the moment, meet her on her terms, and be patient. You’ll do great!
I feel out of the loop. Not sure if it’s me just getting old or not understanding social nuances, but this all feels like people drawing lines and taking sides on something that’s going to vary based on cultural background, age of peers, personal experiences and idiosyncrasies, etc. I don’t feel like it’s a good situation to have two (or more) sides each claiming that it’s offensive to them if someone who doesn’t know them responds using a different side’s preferred response. Kinda puts customer service workers in an impossible situation.
I reflexively say “thanks” when another human does something for me, and I don’t particularly care what their habituated response is. Especially for people working customer service, who are just getting through their day and running their script. Mostly people echo the response that they’re used to hearing from others, so unless I have some reason to think they’re being snarky…??? Your noncommittal phrase of thanks received a noncommittal response, and both parties can move on from the exchange and do something else with their time and energy.
I was vegetarian for 11 years, fully plant based for 2, and I did cook meat at events with people who ate meat. No demographic is a singularity, though, and there are many veggie folk who wouldn’t, either on ethical grounds or on grounds of having no bloody clue how to cook meat properly.
I worry that this also has a rose tinted glasses effect on early user reviews. The only people leaving reviews for the first few days are going to be the people already invested enough to pay extra for early access, and they may be more willing to overlook issues with the game.
It’s kinda flipped from how most people think of it. Dictionaries don’t define which words the language contains–they just write down the meaning of words that people are using. Any word that’s used commonly enough will be added to the dictionary. Webster also has “rizz”, for example. That just popped into common usage a couple years ago and definitely wasn’t coined by a dictionary.
My favorite nonsense words lately have been from Australia. They have whipper-snippers, grow Warrigal greens, eat wombock, and chase off bin chickens. Giving language a purple-nurple is practically the national Aussie pastime.
I have two steam accounts, and I was not able to see anything related to a game marked private from my second account except when family sharing was enabled between the accounts. With family sharing on I could see all private games from my primary account on my secondary (including games which were not installed on the local system).
If you have family sharing on, hold off. Otherwise as far as I know it works as intended.