... you can go to a local independent chop shop and tell them "my phone says I have an extra guanine in my 14 chromosome and it's causing my food allergy to modified mangoes - can you get it out this afternoon?"

Tomahawk Vuvuzela. The answer, then, is to inflict a penalizing tradition on the offending team. A plastic tomahawk that you blow like a trumpet, or a stupid white guy in a suit and a briefcase, white shirt and tie, that is the redskin's new mascot, "Mr. Clueless, the Washington BIA Administrator" and whose mask looks like the owner.

...and the tomahawk chop is both insulting and insanely annoying.

Chief Wahoo is pretty insulting.

Dan Rather knows what happens when you try to out Bush family secrets. I wonder if Lazar's trigger for prosecution in the US was the same.

Despite the purported difficulty with rock and this technology, I believe rock climbing will never be the same.

Yes, one possibility is that there are lots of intelligent independently-evolved species out there communicating and interacting, but we haven't discovered the medium they're using. We've only considered contacting other civilizations for about a hundred years, which is a tiny amount of time. After we've been thinking about it for a few tens of thousands of years we may find out how they're doing it.

And we may be the first (already noted above). Somebody has to be the first, and seeing no others around argues for it.

Then there are the downer-hypotheses, arguing that nobody makes it. 50 years ago it was because of nuclear war. That's still possible, but we're focusing on climate change now instead.

And our star has lots of heavy elements circling around it, much of which make up our own planet, and those heavy elements came from the life cycle of the stars that came before us. Is that process necessary to support the chemical complexity of intelligent life? We don't know yet.

And speaking of learning, where have you learned things that you could not easily or ever have figured out on your own? Which environment or learning experience do you look back on with gratitude?

Next step: catheter and tube from driver - and passenger! - side straight into the fuel cell.
"Got to stop off at the bar first for a couple beers, I don't have enough fuel to make it home."

That's often what happens in a war zone. That, along with lots of expensive and abandoned gear that turned out to be useless.

Since nearly every hospital bed has a TV with cable access, I think it's fair to blame the cable industry for a good percentage of rising medical costs.

Agreed, and they failed to compare their analysis of various computer process times (cache, memory, hard disk, network, etc.) to various human component times, starting with a single neural pulse. On the order of milliseconds, and as you say we can see many of them, simultaneously and serially, when we speak. We don't know how long it will take a spontaneously-arising artificial intelligence to create a thought, retrieve its memories, consider them, observe surroundings, etc., but we can assume it's at least some collection of nanosecond cpu cycles, not a single one; some collection of data fetches, not just one.

And speaking of Gibson, when I learned that William Gibson was told that his computer's storage consisted of a spinning hard-drive, an "antique victorian-style mechanism", as he put it more or less, and that he was told that after he wrote Neuromancer, then I learned that you can focus on writing or you can focus on tech, but choose one because both (or more) may mean each will suffer.

How can scientists, or even "spit kiddies" tinkering in the garage, be sure not to resurrect extinct proteins that do bad things in today's environment?