If you consume a million twinkies encased in a metal cylinder, you won't gain an ounce. You have to absorb the nutrients. The bacteria are most certainly a factor in how the nutrients get processed and eventually absorbed. With the right engineering, the metabolome could be designed such that you could eat forever without becoming obese. There's more than one way (or even two ways) to solve any problem.

It may be a colossal waste of human and natural resources to do that engineering, but that doesn't justify your point at all.
Try to be factually correct.

once all the jobs are actually automated and self sustaining,
we will no longer be unemployed: we will be unemployable.

Whichever aristocrat has the biggest robot army will take over the other robot armies and robot factories, and own the world. Why would he bother to share?

The damages to a Local Contracting Company for one bad review on Yelp are apparently more money than the average contractor makes in a lifetime.

Of course, 700k of that will go to his lawyer, so it comes out to a semi-reasonable amount.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/extremists

miRNAs are not genes.

I don't get this.

We don't HAVE to watch the election news on TV. They don't even have to broadcast it. (At least not as much as they do)

They don't broadcast it, three years out of four. They manage to make up plenty of other useless content to fill their troughs. If it's a foregone conclusion, let it be.

And given that safe red and blue states, according to Nate Silver's analysis, constitute 88% of the union, this proposal seems to have value to a great number of people.

Instead, consider "wasting" your vote in a different way: By voting for someone who isn't running on a major party ticket.

Maybe if enough people realize that their vote in their state isn't actually important when it comes to choosing the next president, they can cast a vote that says "the next next president shouldn't be a Republicrat". Only 6 states in the country aren't 90% in favor of one party or the other, and with the exception of florida, none of them really have much in the way of population. If you live in a 90% state, and were going to vote for the "lesser of two evils", why note vote for "neither of two evils". It'll make no more difference, but a much stronger statement.

You've made a few errors in your fun theoretical musing:

1) Most of our DNA is, in fact, superfluous, as far as we can tell. Less of is superfluous than we thought a few years ago, but more than we thought ten years ago.
2) Evolution does not tend towards optimization. It trends towards "good enough". Extra DNA only matters if you're a bacterial cell, and the rate-limiting step in your growth is the replication of your entire cellular DNA. In many ways, for a human, noncoding DNA is beneficial - random errors and strand breaks are less likely to corrupt important parts of your file if a good chunk is noise anyway.
3) It has, technically, already been done (although not released). Venter's synthetic life form has genetic "watermarks" embedded in it. Nothing as awesome as an entire book, but the premise is there.

There has never been a science write-up posted to slashdot that bore more than a passing resemblance to the actual science.

Seconded. Regenesis is a really good show.

It's got a bad case of CSI syndrome, though.
How do they do 5 man-years worth of science with four people every two weeks? Oh, right, they're BRILLIANT.

So brilliant that one of them dies in a "freak vortex accident". Because the vortex wasn't 'properly maintained'. Never mind that I've had vortexes that were built in the '80s, never been serviced in any way whatsoever (probably not even cleaned...) and will continue working for 30 more years. Never mind that there's no conceivable way that one could malfunction in a way that could ever kill someone.

I suppose this is as good a time as any for me to go on a rant:

A few weeks ago, I got to sit in on a few meetings on the emerging topic of "Bio-Similars". A biosimilar is a generic version of a drug, but not a small molecule drug like all of the generics you see - a generic version of a biotech product. A protein, antibody, or what have you. Some of these patents are about to expire, and some of these drugs are worth billions of dollars in sales.

The FDA finally opened up a way to apply for them, buried somewhere in the health care act. So how do you get one?

0) Make your own version of the original, then submit to the FDA AND the original company all of your documentation on the manufacturing process/etc.
1) Buy millions of dollars worth of the original drug
2) Do clinical trials to prove they're the same

Problems:
0) You're going to get sued for patents on EVERY step of the process, and you're disclosing everything to your competitor.
1) The original manufacturer will not let you buy millions of dollars worth of the original drug. They will claim that the supply is exhausted, or any of a million other things. You have to set up shell companies to buy thousands of dollars worth of the drug and then pool it all together later.
2) It's actually quite a bit more difficult to prove that two things are the same than to prove that one thing works, statistically.

Until something changes, there will not be a license granted for a generic version of any biotech-created drug. It's easier to get a completely new patent on the exact same thing (after you find some way to make an exact copy in a way that is "new" and "non-obvious" enough to get patented...). Except that's something that the original company will have already done as soon as their first patent expired.

Again...small compared to the past, huge compared to what modern technology could easily allow.
A computer could make a market at 1/1billionth of a penny instead of 1/10.

You are missing an important caveat:

Before HFT (1960s): Buyer pays $3, seller gets $2.96. Market maker (rich guy) gets $0.04.
After HFT (2000s): After HFT: Buyer pays $2.99, seller gets $2.97. High Frequency Trader (rich guy) gets $0.02.
Potential with NHFT (2000s): Buyer pays $2.99, seller gets $2.989x. Simple computerized trading system that matches them up gets $0.000001.

My problem with the "market" and capitalism in general is that people in charge of capital refuse to depreciate their cash cows. The $1 they invested in making their infrastructure that earns them back $1 in two years still costs the exact same amount to the consumer twenty years later, and the owner just sits on his laurels, maybe paying $2 every five years or so to whatever competitor has finally managed to find a lender to help him invest $1 to get half of that market.

Except there's nothing carcinogenic about GMO food. There'd be a wholly different label. One that said something to the effect of: "Even though we have no reason to suspect that GMO food carries any risks to the consumer, we are labeling it as GMO food so you can avoid it, in case you are planning to wait until long-term studies can conclusively prove that there is no risk (at which point, you will likely be completely unable to purchase the food any longer, as it will have been replaced by some new technology)"

I would add that entire label. Snark and all. Technology is evolving rapidly and there is really no possible way we can prove that everything is empirically safe before its lifecycle has already expired. However, we have a pretty good grasp of the fundamental mechanisms of human health, and saying that we have no idea how something could be unsafe is pretty close.