I'm pretty sure this article is the extension of the MagLev train for which the 'Shanghai Test Track' is a test. That track is to be extended from the shanghai airport all the way to Hangzhou. The land is all bought up. When I was living in Shanghai 2 years ago there was an unprecedented street protest in the city over the health affects the new train's electromagnetic track would have on the landowners near the track (none, actually, but the uneducated populace is weary of being poisoned and killed by political ambitions.

This is a MagLev train. It runs on a special line, not really rails at all. There is a 20km test track that has been around for a while now that takes you from the Shanghai airport to the city. And it does bend. But it banks. The whole train is at a 45-degree angle while it turns. Kinda scary, but it works.

A substantial reason for the existence of this train is political. It is not in any way cost-effective for the job it will be doing. It is a major PR stunt by the government to show its people it has technological prowess. However, they don't actually have that technological prowess as stated above, rather are just buying the products from someone else.

Equivalent by construction does not always imply reducibility. They are different concepts. Sure, results must be validated, and equations of motion are 'true' now as ever. However, as with your string-theory example, there are ways of describing old theories that don't necessarily subsume each other; equivalent logically (in the end), but not of the same construction/limits of each other.

But at least conceptually, there are ways to describe old experiments that don't follow the old rules at all. I'm not sure new theories *must* be reducible to their predecessors in the limit. It's often easiest that way, but I'm not convinced it's the only way.

Yep. It's called the Correspondence Principle when applied to quantum/classical mechanics. Basically, Newton's equations 'fall out' of Einstein's when you assume the speed of light is a big number relative to all other speeds.
Recently, paradigms in physics have been interesting in this respect as the new perfectly subsume the prior in their limits. I am not sure that this is a tautology of science, but it is an elegant means of progression.

The economic problem is that there is no good way to determine 'good' in any reasonably objective or timely manner.

At the moment, biology is where engineering was a century ago. We NEED standardized parts. We have lots of ground that we could cover very quickly if we didn't have to reinvent the wheel each time we wish to make a small machine.

We now know there are all these different parts. We want to put them together into small mini-machines with anywhere from 2 to 10 parts working together or so. But each one has to be taken from different sources, put together in a completely arbitrary and new manner in order to see where they interact. It would be so useful to take these well-known and established pieces and be able to swap them around to build small machines in a timely manner. We're no where near the current engineering concept of customization.

see my post above.

NEB catalog & technical reference for actual enzyme data and a few conceptual tips at the end: http://www.neb.com/nebecomm/neb_mail_form.asp

Molecular Cloning for actual protocols: http://molecularcloning.com/

Molecular Biology of the Cell for conceptual background: http://www.garlandscience.com/textbooks/0815332181.asp

Oh, and by the way, if there are any ambitious young coders who want to revolutionize bioengineering, all you have to do is write some decent software which can objectively navigate the complicated but exceedingly logical rules of basic cloning. Someone who could write a program with a nice GUI where you just dragged around genes along a plasmid backbone, told it what organism you're to be working in, and have it spit out the plasmid one should use, the oligos & primers needed to be ordered, along with the enzymes to be used could enable a lot of time to be saved in the lab and make a lot of synthetic biology MUCH more accessible. It's a simple kind of code. Great fun for the programming mind. But the current software is god-awful, and exceedingly limited.

Apparently they've streamlined a technique whereby the biological mishmash of understanding is standardized into 'code-like' organization. So instead everyone looking up how to make their own gene of their liking, knowing everything about the whole process from the DNA, to the organism to output, you instead just plug in what you want.

In biology there are known 'promoters' (that say "Start"), terminators ("END"), with the gene in the middle, and a number of other little addons and 'features'. Currently in the lab I have to paste these together on my own, from different sources, using different techniques on each. I have to bring each piece into my local standard before I can put them all together. Because it is MUCH easier to change a few bases, or add/delete, than it is to synthesize de novo entire strands of DNA, there exists a need to have modular, standardized 'code' that can easily be swapped from one project to another. These guys make that easy, I guess. When your goal is not just to change/alter a gene, but to set up a few altered/new/engineered genes (or even an entire pathway) at once, this could save a lot of headache.

China has an interesting version of this. There are 52 minority ethnic groups in China, remember, 52 exactly. What the government has done is allow those groups to get a kind of royalty fee for distribution of those ethnic foods in non-ethnic regions. For example, if a big restaurant wants to serve 'GuiZhou Fish' then the peoples (government, some organization, I'm not sure...) of GuiZhou get some cut of the profits from that food. An interesting concept. Might serve them well. I can see no less reason why it's appropriate than any other intellectual property. If you concede that a product is simply the sum of parts + assembly, then why not ingredient + recipe?

I would absolutely pay $400 for it if my service was $20-30/month.

China is a fool's bet right now. Unless a person has lived there or worked directly with a Chinese company for more than a year, they are simply not qualified to assess the benefits of Chinese economics. It's many many years behind where most people think it is. And that deception is intentional. It's amazing how many get repeatedly burned looking for the magic billion-man market.