Yeah, I hate it when I write something serious and get back 3:Funny. Maybe mods should be limited to the serious mods for posts declared serious and Funny only for posts tagged as a joke. I'll send the Wicked Early News team after this story...

Stop it with the insults... I am the LostCluster (See me on Twitter!) and my account got stolen. I need DB Admin help to get it back. I can be authenticated as me.

This is so easy... leave some emoticon, shorthand, or just plain the word "Joke" to mark all jokes so they don't get taken the wrong way.

Cheap sequencing is a little scary to me. How close are they from creating a person from picked genes and how does that affect evolution?

You should be modded Insightful rather than Funny. It's true, I do enjoy sharing information with others.

People who have less money are depressed... so those who can't afford to pay for content are more likely to steal it than those who can afford to pay.

The early-day-P2P solutions like Napster and AIMster all failed because they did such a good job of sorting illegal uploads, the legal uses were hard to find. Protocols like Bittorrent care not whether the file is legal or not... they just blindly pass the data. There are many good free-to-stream podcasts that need the help of BT users in order to get their show out. Hollywood would love to find a way to keep their stuff out while the legal stuff still moves... but right now the best solution they have is an all-out shoutdown.

Text messaging flows through a pipe... that is, in any given area there is plenty of room for more text messages in flow, and the only way the system fails is if there's enough to fill the pipe. Unused bits of airtime are like empty airline seats, they're worth $0 once the time passes. So, does 50 cents a message seem reasonable when e-mail is charged at the data rate which is much cheaper... and AIM,Skype, Google's products, MySpace, Facebool, etc. all also travel over the data pipe? SO, there it is, plain text messaging is going away.... and it's going to be a lot like the old days of Prodigy and AOL where you have to select which protocol to use to reach your friends.

To tell a story, you need to speak with the person who generated the story and decide whether you believe them. Somebody must be a witeness to the event that happened, otherwise there's little to no way to report the story.

The editors have the ability to authenticate me. I'm coming from the same IP address LostCluster was last seen at before the e-mail and password change that locked me out of my account. There's other before/after differences they can notice to return the LostCluster account to me.

Decisions can be automated in the form of "Every time X happens, do Y." however somebody needs to know that Y must be done to respond to X in order for the system to be setup. It's easy to automate things like "Do this the same way every time." but some human has to solve the puzzle for the first time for that to work.

My point is, the chain of knowledge must start with a human somewhere. If computers rewrite the press release, the press release is coming from a human. Also, the right to reprocess news has to come from somewhere, you can't use an automated or human process to steal somebody else's news.

Sometimes the security people are the terrorists, spreading threats they make up to justify their own existing.

I agree, sporting events to me are much more fun to watch on TV.

The word "administration" is a variable, not a part of the constant strings?