This guy is seriously the number one reason I have and will ever have for wanting to move to Oregon. I am tired of writing letters to my representatives and senators telling them to be more like him, and tired of writing him letters thanking him for fighting for MY rights even though I can't vote for him.

The first part is actually pretty easy. You typically grow the virus using a plasmid construct you have created. That piece of DNA is just DNA without the viral mechanism, and you can easily sequence it to confirm you got what you wanted, as well as use various reporters for in vivo expression. When you express that plasmid in cells, the virus produced is only from your version and never came in contact with the original.

As for the second, I'm not sure why you would get an auto-immune disease from this - normal immune responses don't usually cause such diseases. In fact, that the immune system does attack and clear the virus (normal behavior), such that the virus is eventually cleared from the body. The goal is to have the gene inserted and expressed without persistent viral infection.

That's what "louder" means. Put some averages and standard deviations in there if you like, but "peak loudness forever" is louder than "peak loudness for a brief moment." I usually drive my car around the speed limit but I went 100mph once, a car going 100mph all the time is faster than me.

It's there for the same reason "Minnesotan" is there - background. In fact, I'd say it's there only to modify the state she calls home. From a legal perspective, what state you are in has importance for various courts and precedence, so legally minded people would be interested. Saying she is from Minnesota might not be technically accurate since, as a Native American, her relationship to the state could very well be slightly different than one might expect.

Decided by scientists, decided by scientists, decided by religious extremists.

That list is not parallel. Whether you agree or not with a naming decision, better it be based on sound evidence. Naming has important consequences for how something is treated, money is allocated, and perhaps more importantly, how language is used. That's why we have pro-life and pro-choice, instead of anti-choice or anti-life - names matter. They convey information, hopefully accurately. When the word planet is used, we all have a common understanding of what that implies. The PATRIOT ACT and Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act were named that way for exactly that reason, because names matter.

My biggest issue is doing away with iTunes DJ. I use tons of playlists, but the DJ was and still is the best way to listen to them. It played a playlist but allowed me to easily change the order of songs coming up without clicking the shuffle button a bunch of times. I could manually change my order without affecting the playlist. And, perhaps most importantly, if I wanted to listen to one or two songs NOT in that playlist, just find them and add them to the queue. It's essentially a way to make quick, on-the-fly, and temporary playlists.

The reelection of the first non-white person to be president in the USA was the biggest and most-watched news event, any type of racism not aimed at Obama would not relevant, regardless of where it came from or was aimed at.

They do the same thing on TV. "World premier of MOVIE", "US premier of MOVIE", "Network premier", "Cable premier", "Season premier", and so on.

I personally imagine the USAF having one as a bit of an insult: "Hey guys, I know we took this program away from you but here, show it off any way!" The Enterprise is housed on a World War II aircraft carrier alongside the only tourable nuclear submarine (USS Growler) and the transonic Concorde as well as aircraft from all branches of the military and a Soyuz capsule. A Sea, Air, and Space museum sounds like a perfect place for a shuttle.

Please keep doing what you're doing. I had my graphing calculator stolen in high school, and was not happy about having to shell out the cash for a new one. I had a test later that day that required one, so I went to the head of the department and she reached into a box marked "graduated" and pulled one out. She put every found calculator that came her way into a box labelled with that year. Four years later she moved it into the graduated box, understanding that the student had since left and would not be claiming their lost property. She simply handed me one and said not to worry about it. A decade later I still use it.

I can't speak for the younger ages (what this is really about, since wide-spread anti-vaccination folks are relatively a recent phenomenon) but this has already happened at the upper levels! You need to have a fair number of vaccines (e.g., Hepatitis and Meningitis) before many high schools these days, and for college as well. Those are two examples where teenage kids are the perfect risk group given increased sexual and drinking activity whilst living together tightly (dorms in college) and the schools have made a calculated choice NOT to let these terrible things sweep in easily. Everyone complies now, but in ten years when these anti-vaccer's kids are headed off to get a BA in English I wonder if mommy and daddy will still be scared of the Hep.

When Israelis say it it's spelled "Oy" and is usually followed by "vey!"

FTFC just might be the best and most useful acronym I've seen in a long time.

Maybe, but the reason Mr. and Mrs. Public couldn't vote on every single bill or issue is time spent voting and time spent understanding and debating the issue. The advent of internet polling does away with the former - it's trivial to register a vote on an online poll every morning. As for the latter, well, since when have our elected officials fully and honestly understood and debated every bill? A large portion of what gets voted on is just "issue bills," and those are usually treated as if they're black and white concepts anyway. In the end, all this guy needs to do is efficiently and fairly distill the essence of each bill into a few bullet points that people can easily say "Yea" or "Nay" on. If that arrives in everyone's inbox by 7AM he can have most of his voting planned by 10AM.

In the USA at least, slavery was toppled by a gruesome and bloody war, after which the justice system allowed a system only slightly less worse to become institutionalized for over 100 years.