...welcome our Lego overlords.

With banning cartoon-style advertising of cigarettes. How would people feel if they started giving away free MP3s with purchases of booze (or whatever 21-year-olds are into)...

I think people need to relax, they're not robbing you of any sort of personal liberty, they're just toning down advertising for products you shouldn't be consuming anyway. It's in the best interest of the whole world.

Car analogy: an old Honda can basically do everything a Ferrari can do. They essentially have all the same features. But one does it with style and feels good to use. Also, regarding your Treo. MP3 players were around for years before iPods, and we all know how that played out. Just accept it, form matters. Function isn't the only issue.

You're right - that's probably where it started! That said, codon refers to the only (that I can think of) true code in biology. The other potential codes just mentioned (DNA methylation, histone mods, etc) are really more biochemical features that interact with proteins to regulate gene expression. The triplet code (code) is basically universal. TAA means STOP to every organism on the planet from worms to fish to bacteria to man. Histone mods and DNA methylation matter, but they're much more specific to particular cells/organisms.

Let me follow-up with a car analogy: Imagine you found the blueprints for a car that had a slight problem (say occasional aberrant acceleration, for example). Sequencing cancer genomes is akin to *finding* these blueprints. But it gets worse, the blueprints are in a different language and have no idea what 70% of the parts in the plans actually DO. Yes - the blueprint is helpful. Very helpful. In fact there's not much you can do without it. But it doesn't immediately help you FIX the problem. The only feature of DNA that is truly a *code* that was had to be *cracked* was the triplet code for amino acids and that was cracked by Khorana, Holley and Nirenberg in the '60s.

World: please stop calling DNA sequences "codes" that can be "cracked". There is no encryption going on here and, if you really want to use that metaphor than what they're doing is not cracking (decrypting) the code, but determining its sequence. Sequencing 4 cancer genomes is an enormous achievement that will provide countless biological insights, but nothing was "cracked". I'm a biologist, but aren't there cryptographers out there that are annoyed by this terminology???

It is believed that you're inocculated with your gut microbes at birth (largely from your mother) and this community shifts and stabilizes during your first year. More studies are needed on this sort of thing (and many are ongoing right now) but it is thought that the community of gut microbes you acquire can be quite robust and resist colonization by other, competing microbes. So, it's not preposterous to think that a certain population might be more likely to get colonized by a certain species of microbes than others. That said, if you lived in japan for a generation or two, or ate lots of sushi for a few generations there's no reason to think you wouldn't develop the same type of microbes in your gut.

I really wish I could disagree with you, but you're probably right on some level. To me, WinAmp peaked with v2.78. Office peaked with v2003. Photoshop and Illustrator peaked around ~CS1 or earlier. As soon as the open-source apps catch up to those feature-sets, I'm happy and can finally stop buying (pirating) the commercial versions. But you're probably right about new (younger) users and their new expectations about what hardware/software can/should do. As far as I'm personally concerned, though, as soon as OO can copy 99% of the features in Office 2003 (close, but not quite there yet) I'll never look back. And, I've got my breath held for Inkscape, etc.

...because MS Office can't continue adding new features forever. They'll try, but eventually their software will plateau and stabilize into an Office suite that has all of the features anybody would ever want. And then it will take OO a few years to duplicate all of those features and then it'll be a real threat. OO will always be a few years behind, until MS Office stops changing.

Do things like EFF and NPR count as charity? How about paying for shareware?