Up, unlike a Led Zeppelin. If they would just get lead out, they'd shoot right to the top.

I think you mean "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

Cancer doesn't work that way, you idiot. Cancer is like randomly changing data in a file. This is like changing a computer from binary into ternary, a computer virus can't do that.

The article I read also said "IT HAS 216 COMBINATIONS!!1!!@@!! REGULAR DNA ONLY HAS 20!!!@!". Which is stupid because they're counting two different ways. 6^3 is indeed 216, but 4^3 is 64, and 20 is 31% utilization of 64 possibilities.

The reason is that some combinations are reserved for start and stop codons, and most amino acids have 2 or 4 redundant codings. This both reduces the effect of random mutations, and also makes multi-frame coding work better by being less strict. The bits that match the codes to amino acids when building proteins probably use some kind of wildcards, reducing the number of them needed when you have to basically have a unique small chemical around to match each valid combination. It would be more realistic to say that the new base pairs would allow 45-50 or so new protein codings, still more than tripling the potential number of amino acids.

That being said, a new set of base pairs is really cool. There have been experiments to create alternate DNA codings by re-purposing some of the redundant codings, but there is a backward compatibility kind of problem when doing that. This not only allows a lot of new codes, but the new base pairs themselves have interesting properties. One even has a bond out to the side that you can connect things too. And the twisty folding stuff that RNA likes to do can become a lot more complicated.

And why does Earth life use only 4 base pairs? Probably because the extra complexity just isn't all that useful. CGAT has been around for a couple of billion years, so it's got more installed base behind it than QWERWTY vs DVORAK could ever have. Except this is more like adding a new row or three to QWERTY for more roman-letter characters, such as a bunch of letters with diacritical marks on them, like how the French went nuts romanizing Vietnamese.

Magazine ads don't squirm and wriggle around, expand to take up the whole page, scribble lines under words all over the page, or play loud sounds. Magazine ads are quite unintrusive compared to internet ads.

I'm not really sure what your point is here. That's like asking if paying your ISP bill should make the internet ad-free. Even cable TV isn't analogous, in that it pays some amount for most of the channels you get, then charges you to put it all together.

Cable TV is a transport service. Ads on TV are to pay for the content. Or at least that's the basic idea. Cable TV technology has been able to "insert" (actually overwrite) ads on individual channels for years, though I'm sure they do pay a little to the channel for the privilege. (Some people seem to think that cable TV was ad-free from the start, but it really started by retransmitting over-the-air channels for areas where it was hard to receive. Then they got a bunch more channels when satellite became big, and eventually those channels ran their own commercials.)

What I got tired of was intrusive internet ads. That's the equivalent of trying to read a newspaper while pictures are constantly squirming around and shouting at you. I don't even like news sites that autoplay video. But once I'm triggered to add a new block, I'll also go and block all the domains that are obviously not related to the site content, including the ones that try to track you. It's really surprising to see 20 or 30 domains referenced by a web page for ads and tracking.

I-35 (Texans don't use "the" with highway names) is particularly fun because it is almost always under construction somewhere. Currently the major construction is between Austin and Waco, and in northeast San Antonio. That is (was) some of the oldest sections (1960s era) still remaining, back when they thought curbs were a good idea on freeways. The Austin to Waco section has long been beyond its capacity, with construction making things worse.

And there was a major incident a few months ago when an over-height semi truck went under a bridge and pulled out a concrete beam behind it. (The beam was for a new bridge that was still being built, so it wasn't tied in yet.)

That normally only happens on rural roads with wide shoulders. It also only happens when another car wants to faster than you, more often because the car wants to go 10 over than because you want to go 10 under. So I don't think they're likely to be on the receiving side of this. More likely the driverless car would be the one in front with its bumper being ridden.

I had three different "Aluminum" case PowerBooks/MacBookPros. (That case frame was crap, the DVD slot would go out of alignment, my skin oils made pits in the surface, and the latch didn't work very well.) The last one had the battery go bad at an early age.

I was calling Apple tech support about my click not working, and "oh by the way, my battery isn't holding a charge". I was asked the number of charge cycles and "Okay, we'll send you a replacement."

A few days later by the time it arrived, I realized that the battery was bulging. And that's why the trackpad click wasn't working.

Also, my cousin has a unibody 15" where the trackpad looks shattered, but it still works fine.

Also Dangerous Prototypes, quite a few things appear there a few days before Hackaday or Slashdot picks them up.

Derek Lowe, In The Pipeline, I got into him from his Things I Won't Work With tag (Note: he's going to be moving to another domain in a few weeks)

Stephen Smith's Space KSC (I think he's a bigwig with NASA's outreach or advocacy programs or something)

Bunnie Huang's blog (famous for hacking the Xbox, but he isn't updating very often this year, so he must be working on something)

And this is the most important reason to not ever talk with telemarketers aside from "please put me on your do not call list". Once you're a "live fish", your name and phone number are worth more money to them. Even more so when a "charity" (real or fake) cold-calls you, and you actually give them money. (of which they probably took at least 80% for "expenses")

You need a license to make phone calls now? Please tell me where I can get one so that I can keep calling my pet fish Eric. He gets so lonely when nobody calls.

This new thing is based on mbed, which uses an online web-based cloud IDE and compiler, nothing to install. I've seen indications that they may want to run their own back-end on a different domain than the usual mbed compiler, but it should be the same principle. Once you hit compile, all your code (stored remotely, but you can get it exported as a zip file) is compiled, and it creates the .bin file as a Save As, which you save to the (usually fake) file system presented by the USB interface, which then programs the target CPU.