It's not a translation problem, some of the original manuscripts have different text. Kind of a problem with the days before copy machines. I think more versions have 666, but the older ones have 616.

Donald Trump tried to patent "you're fired," so there's precedent for trying. He failed though (luckily) and I have to assume Nintendo will fail too. Also, I'd keep using it and not paying them royalties so it would really only affect print usage, and I doubt it's a common phrase in the Times.

A Strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

You could run it on a tablet (Archos and a couple others did it, I hear Dell has plans to, but we'll see if that pans out) or an e-reader (Nook) or a netbook (Aspire One). It still runs, you can still do what you want/need to with it, but you don't need the phone (or the contracts)

Granted, most of these have proprietary overlays, but it doesn't make the OS itself any less open. I'd even posit that the fact that so many different companies are using it for so many different purposes indicates that it is open.

That's not a problem with Android, it's a problem with the phones.

And I think we can all (users of Android, iOS, BB, Windows Mobile, Symbian, whatever) agree that the real evil is the phone companies.

But if the two are essentially the same as far as features are concerned, most bosses will default to the commercial version and will need to be convinced that the open software is just as good an option. That could be the case here; either would do the job so why not go with FOSS?

It's not really IP over pigeon, it's just data movement.

But if you coupled your pigeon distributer to a phone so you could request data and they could send it (or vice-versa) it would kind of work out, and definitely be faster than poor internet for large files. You could also just fly the pigeons back and forth, but then your requests would take a lot of time too.

And keep in mind, as data density increases, so will the amount the pigeon can carry and thus the "speed" of the pigeon network. It might actually be faster than people think.

Also it's still just a publicity stunt.

Thank you. Most people seem to have missed the point that he's going to be in charge of the business end, not product development.

Granted, the two are obviously intertwined, but he's going to be dealing with money and people, not the decisions about what software to pursue/cancel except on a big picture scale.

If it's theatre that we're paying for, shouldn't we get to watch it? Oh no, we would manipulate it if we could watch it.

Thank you. I'm also religious, and a scientist, and I get no end of crap because people assume that I rigorously follow everything that my religion says, or that is said in defense of my religion. You can have faith and still make your own decisions.

I also agree that people need to look at religion as more than just some statements. It's a whole cultural phenomenon, a way for people to pass knowledge about who they are and how they should act from one generation to the next. And many people who are not at all religious just as blindly follow other things. I'm not talking just about politics and such, but science too. Flat earth theory, geocentrism, etc. were all accepted (blindly) by people for a long time until new theories came up.

For my contribution, I do think there's something to the 'scientific impotence' idea. Some things are not (at least yet) addressable by science, and that's where faith can step in. It's kind of the point of religion to explain inexplicable things (or eff the ineffable). People (on both sides) need to accept that religion is not supposed to be scientific. Science needs to be falsifiable, replicable, etc and religion just isn't. Obviously religious people should stop trying to religion away science, but just as much scientists should stop trying to science away religion.

Right, but these are the sorts of things that DNA testing isn't going to do a lot for. For instance: lactose tolerance/intolerance is based a lot on the past exposure to lactose. Yes there is a genetic component, but the bigger issue is when the genes stop being expressed which is based on the amount of lactose you have to digest. People who keep drinking milk at a high rate are less likely to develop intolerance than those who stop because when there is no (or little) lactose present, your body stops making the enzymes necessary to break it down. Yes, I understand there is a genetic component, but genotype-environment interactions are important. And it's not a hard thing for people to figure out if it does arise. No genetic testing necessary.

Alcohol tolerance is even worse. It depends a lot on how much you have drunk before, how much you've eaten that day, how hydrated you are, what kind of shape you're in etc. Easier ways to figure it out are just based on your gender and weight. Again, I don't need DNA testing to tell me that I'm a small male. And again, people tend to figure out their tolerance pretty quickly. And then they ignore it and get sloshed anyway because they're college students. I don't really think telling a student "Hey, your genes say you have a high alcohol tolerance!" is a brilliant idea. Sounds like a good way to tell someone to drink a lot and get alcohol poisoning.

Still very skeptical about the possible benefits of this, and still feel like it's open to abuse.

What is this DNA going to be used for? How is it going to "help students make decisions about their diet and lifestyle." Will they use it for genetic screening? In my opinion, most DNA screening is useless. It's like a full body scan, I'm sure you're going to find something, but is it going to be anything you can change? Or anything you care about? Or will it just make you nervous about a 1% increase in the chance that you'll get some rare cancer? Most gene association studies are weak at best anyway. It's pretty rare that one gene, or even one QTL is responsible for most or all of a phenotype.

I'm sure they'll use this in other ways too. They say it's confidential, but it can probably get trotted out in the case of some sort of criminal proceedings. Which is probably a good thing, conceptually, but is still somewhat of an invasion. And it's voluntary now, but will it stay that way?