...I think you're the first person in history to call Windows 8.1 "good" and Windows 2000 "bad." What's your secret?

There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaints, and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.

What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven's sake, mankind, it's only four light years away, you know! I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own regard. Energise the demolition beams! God, I don't know⦠apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy at allâ¦

I think there's already a 2030 mission in the works to send the boulder back with flowers, chocolates, and an apology letter inscribed on a golden disc that reveals a YouTube compilation of Carl Sagan quotes if placed in a laserdisc player. (The instructions on the sleeve for constructing such a device simply say "This product has been discontinued" in a mixture of pulsar coordinates and atomic oscillations.)

Not that far from the truth.

If terrorism is a way to guarantee people do your job for you, then perhaps we have discovered the secret eighth habit of highly effective managers?

No—I was limiting the scope of my concerns to this particular tax grab attempt and the corresponding infrastructure upgrade that it would fund. I apologize for the confusion.

Does "saving the country" not count as something to accomplish? You've got me confused here.

...Someone from the back row shouts out "Because our AdSense profile has determined you were visiting websites about cigarettes recently, your health insurance premium has gone up by 5% and you will probably die slightly sooner. Remember, [i]f you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place!"

Is it cynicism if you're just using a Markov chain to predict what other Slashdotters will say?

(Although obviously this is auto insurance, so I'm sure someone can translate the threat appropriately.)

Factabunga, dudes!

I feel like I should've known that. Thanks for the correction.

It may not happen; the modern Olympics, quite unlike the ancient Olympics, have not always been purely about physical sports. Competitions like poetry and painting were removed in part because the same entrants won year after year—this has not, so far, been an issue for e-sports.

...Not having any particular stake in this argument, are we quite sure that's Tyrell's intended meaning, something so mundane? I think Tyrell is more taking about stuff like this:

...i.e., Roy's greatness and accomplishment as a person. At that point, Tyrell wants to sooth Roy and make him accept his place by calling him amazing. Simply saying "well, that's the cost of bein' so darn strong" conflicts with his next line: "And you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy."

Hey, um... what if dark matter is just heaps of rogue planets and left-over dust and gasses from nebulae? Given that we've only recently gotten a handle on how many rogue planets there are out there, wouldn't they've been left out of our previous calculations?

Oh, but it is. You just need to know how to refer to it properly.

The genes they identified were all proteins.

I'm not that much of an expert on microarrays, but I'm pretty sure most or all of the arrays they used predate the Encode project's results that made people re-evaluate the question of how much of the genome is really important. Here is a list of the arrays they used:

Illumina: HumanHap550, 318K, 350K, 610K, 660W Quad, HumanOmniExpressExome-8 v1.0, Human610 Quadv1, 370, 317, HumanOmniExpress-12v1 A

Affymetrix: GeneChip 6.0, 250K

This study was the keystone project of a consortium founded in early 2011. I think, given the size, it simply took this long to get the results. That, too, was a time before Encode publications had really started impacting the world. Whatever RNA genes they would have had at the time would be pathetic and paltry by comparison to what we consider worth studying now.