Aliens use cheap noname chinese laptops?

That's why you have a multiplier based on the number of total infractions of any and all companies that are subsidiaries of the same companies, have had the same companies as subsidiaries,or share majority shareholders/board members. It could go something like this: 1e6*2^n dollars where n is the number of infractions.

By putting it into landfill you are still transferring ownership.

Assuming they are true, none of these things rebut gp's statement.

Humans are good at doing these things called generalising and abstraction.
We can abstract away from receiving buttsecks to 'things that bring pleasure to the individual' or even more abstract concepts like 'maximising my utility function'. It gets fuzzy and difficult when trying to compare dissimilar utility functions, but that's why we have all these laws and public forums for debate and such like.

Another approach would be to augment this with a bottom up approach (for those words they can't quite get, or if all the languages die). It's fairly easy to get anough mathematics accross to communicate a simple audio and/or video codec (anyone competent enough to build microscopes and semiconductors is going to get the basic logical operations and from there some kind of assembly isn't hard).
Then include a bunch of sesame street and other stuff aimed at kids. Suppliment it with picture dictionaries along with our current understanding of linguistics and how it applies to the languages we know.

So you're saying we should bring the fast food home and use it to destroy all the kids favourite toys then send them to their room with no dinner?

I don't get it.

I realise this, but what was the joke? Isn't humour usually based on some misrepresentation or exaggeration?

Explaining mathematics accessably is hard (much harder than merely providing a correct formal description), takes a long time, and is often only possible with a test audience. If you're willing to spend the time to add such explanations to wiki you're quite welcome.
Until then I'm going to be grateful for the already large amount of time and effort put in to providing what is already there.

Well I had him again the next semester and helped tutor both courses later. He had fixed it.

I had a prof who used one of these as part of a package deal type thing they got along with some (arguably very good) other resources. When people from the class told him about the issues involved (buying used books, strange deadlines, OS/screen size/browser requirements etc) he removed it at the first opportunity (sadly not during that course, as once something is set in the paperwork as part of the course assessment it cannot be changed here).
Sometimes treating your prof as a human being works, try it some time.

Posting to call myself out somewhat as noone else seems to have.
I did a bit of reading on taxonomy, and there are good reasons for the modern versions of morphology based taxonomies. Lateral gene transfer, difficulty of placing things in the correct clades due to lack of information, altogether missing sections of the fossil record and so on.
Having things like (or rather continuing to teach first) reptiles (include all these things but exclude these two groups because we think they're cuddly) as a group still seem a little bizarre and anthropocentric, but this doesn't mean the correct answer is to go to the other extreme.

You are all arguing because traditional taxonomy is intensely stupid.
There is a reasonably hard point at which we can define the distinction between two creatures: the last common ancestor.
Yes it only works in hindsight.
Yes it is still a bit fuzzy (many populations cross breed slightly whilst diverging).
But it's a hell of a lot better than this stupidity.
You just draw monophyletic boundaries, rather than 'I'm including this, but not that because I think it looks funny'. Subsets of subsets and suddenly the problem goes away.
Renaming each group would help with the confusion, but personally I'm happy calling birds dinosaurs and calling both birds and humans bony fish. Draw the distinctions at what is fundamental (genes) rather than whatever some long dead biologist who didn't understand as much as we do thought.

The phrase (as it referred to stuff outside of physics) originally was used (reasonably accurately) for discrete rather than continuous (or imperceptably small) changes. I believe it entered the common lexicon from popularizations of the quantum model of bound electrons. This spread to anything about getting from state A to state B without spending much/any time in between.
I agree with the sentiment that it's a bit odd, thinking about it form a physical point of view it seems that it should refer to a single change to a single gene in a single generation.

Yes, but many of them are the worst of both worlds. Speculative and unproven whilst being presented as dogmatic fact. This increases the public perception that science is both certain/absolute and changes its mind frequently/frivolously, and makes it even harder to explain how it really works.