Anyone know what that fried out component is in the picture on TFA?

I don't think that one leads to the other. The eventual result of the mutation may be selecting in the sense that we only observe certain ones...that doesn't mean that it was not random to begin with.

Actually, you're on the right track.

For example, if you look at the triplet codons which code for amino acids, you can see that (in general) the more detrimental a mutation (such as positively charged residue to negatively charged), the more the codon has to be changed.

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code

So I guess one can say that there is a mechanism in place to minimize the negative effects of random mutation. The mutations themselves are still random, however.

Obviously a great deal of nuance was left out of this and my previous comment. Genetics is big, and really can't be done justice in a /. thread.

Epigenetics, in my mind, is something different. To quote from your link:
"However, there is no change in the underlying DNA sequence of the organism"

It is simply control of which genes are expressed, not control of which genes are present in the genetic code.

Though, my definition of mutation could be completely off? Please correct me if so.

ALL mutations are random. If they are advantageous, great, than it is likely that they will be passed along.

Fuck this game. Seriously, I can't get ANYTHING done now.

Now I gotta go try and break this siege.

I'm using a unibody pro, so that must be it. The support is still pretty clunky though, I feel like it has more misreads than in OS X.

Works fine in Win 7 RC. Was it disabled in XP/Vista? The scrolling is a bit jerky though compared to OS X.

I dunno about a car analogy, but I always think of magnetic monopoles like a point charge. You can have an object be either positively or negatively charged. Get two near each other and you have a dipole, which is like a normal magnet.
What you would do with one I have no clue, but I bet there would be a fleet of magnet researches chomping at the bit to find something.

Only in certain directions.

I was able to get my X41 tablet to have good battery life (a bit better than windows actually), but it took some doing. Powertop is a godsend, it pointed me to the i915 intel drivers as the culprit. Disabling DRI made a huge difference.

Oh snaps, I think I might have played that once (loooong time ago though). Did it have a bunch of little green MFDs that you could customize on the fly?

emerge gaussrifle; emerge heatsinks

Insufficient disk space for mech-utils/heatsinks

Dammit!

It might encourage ad people to have their ads not be obnoxious pieces of crap.

Probably not, but I can hope.