I think it's more likely that a bag handler or TSA agent flat out stole the flutes, and the "agricultural product" excuse is just some run-around style bureaucratic ass-covering. One of our agents stole your things? Oh actually it's because of [MADE-UP REASON], and you need to contact [RANDOM OTHER AGENCY] to deal with it.

Well since the new codon requires the organism to interact with an artificial, human-supplied substance, this seems like a good way to keep manmade organisms in check. Sort of like the dinosaurs in jurassic park. Oh dear.

About, say, twenty years?

Hey, AC. I think you are right that nobody has really answered your question as you posed it, but they do THINK that they have. So let me try to couch one of their answers in your question... The fundamental difference between buying labor and buying cigarettes is that the money for the cigarettes just goes into the coffers of the company (and that of the sin tax goes to the government), but the money for the LABOR goes to a living person, who in turn PUTS THAT MONEY BACK INTO THE ECONOMY by spending it. So when minimum wage goes up, spending among consumers goes up, so demand for goods and services rises, and businesses can prosper thus hiring more people at higher wages. And just because we don't know exactly where the cutoff is between a GOOD rise in minimum wage versus a BAD one, that doesn't mean that a cutoff doesn't exist; our economic models are just too rudimentary to map it out exactly.

That's what they are arguing against you, but I say to them that this assumes too much. For instance, if you are making minimum wage--whatever it is--and you find yourself with some money to spare, if you have any sense at all you will SAVE it, so that you have a rainy day fund or use it as capital toward getting/finding a better job!!! The arguments also ignore the fact that not everybody who WANTS a job NEEDS one that pays a living wage, like high school students in the summer. Instead of learning how to participate in the economy, young, unskilled, casual workers like these are generally priced out of the market. But the dark side to the issue is that some will enter the marker NONETHELESS, thus competing with those who ACTUALLY need to make enough money to live on. Then there is black market labor. I had a friend in high school who worked construction, hauling bricks, among illegal immigrants and people on welfare. Illegal labor has no minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage increases the black market for labor, thus giving companies with high demands for unskilled labor further incentive either to hire people illegally, move to a country where it costs less to hire people, or go out of business.

tl;dr: having a minimum wage means having a black labor market, and raising the minimum wage hurts those it is meant to help.

I've been using Linux since I was in 6th grade: Mandrake 6.something, Suse 7.something, Slackware 10, Redhat 9, a bunch of smaller live-cd and media-centric distros, Ubuntu, and now Fedora 16. I've used KDE, Gnome 2, Blackbox, Fluxbox, Windowmaker, and flirted with FVWM and a couple others. I appreciate minimal aesthetic and functionality as much as any Linux nut, but this is why I like Gnome3.

No, it's not very customizable. But I find its setup intuitive and functional. No, it's not graphically minimal, but computers are far more powerful now than they were even five minutes ago... Graphic simplicity used to be very important, then it was preferable, but now--I feel--it's okay to have a little eye candy. (Take my words with a grain of salt, though. I have become a casual user over the years.)

Still, they should have kept up Gnome2 the way people knew and loved it.

Racism is: canceling a conference because of the race of the speakers.

"no one expects ads in a piece of software that they just paid good money for"

Why not? You pay for cable TV and see ads, you see product placement in the shows you watch between the ads, there's product placement in movies, advertisements for other products on the products you buy, ads for books on the backs of books, and the list goes on. The only thing, I think, that really KEEPS ads OUT of a product is the value of its aesthetic. You'll never see an ad on the back of a fancy-looking leather-bound book, because you're paying for an aesthetic that precludes it. You won't find an ad in, say, a free Linux distro, because the aesthetic of the culture precludes it.

So I think we should look at this from the opposite perspective: why are ads showing up in Windows NOW? It may be a sign that Microsoft's business model is changing in some way, but I think it may have more to do with the adoption of the app-market aesthetic. You may not expect to see an ad in an app that you paid for, but you REALLY wouldn't expect to see an ad in a traditional program like Excel or Photoshop.

Could that be overcome by conventionally breaking up pi into blocks of certain sizes, then conceptualizing those blocks as matrices of conventional height and width?

I am (pleasantly) surprised by how many of my friends have "come out," as it were, as atheists over the last few years. I'm a young person, and I suspect that the amount of closet atheists among younger people (in America at least) is much greater than that among older people. In general, how optimistic are you about humanity getting past religion in the next few decades?

Things I have never seen: 1. a bicyclist obeying a stopsign. 2. a unicorn. 3. a bicyclist stopping at a crosswalk.
Things I have seen rarely: 1. a perfect 10 on the uneven bars. 2. a car passing a cyclist without giving them a berth of at least 2 extra meters.
Things I see all the time: 1. cyclists cutting off pedestrians. 2. cyclists running red lights. 3. cyclists cutting in and out of traffic.

I live by a college campus. I've talked with a campus police officer about all the bike accidents we've had here. He says the overwhelming majority are the fault of the cyclist. Helmets are small potatoes compared to 1. the devil-may-care attitude toward traffic laws that seems to prevail among cyclists and 2. the unsafe piggybacking of considerations for bicycles onto existing roads. Consider the bike lane: it continues straight through an intersection, ACROSS the right turn lane for cars! Furthermore, drivers are not used to this situation because it's both novel and counter-intuitive. Someone please design a better road and let's all tell our cyclist friends to obey the signs.

Contrary to popular belief, the Romans knew about lead poisoning and figured out ways to avoid it. For instance, aqueducts were lined with lead to make them waterproof. New aqueducts were mandated to run for a certain amount of time before water was drawn from them. In that time, the Romans knew, the minerals in the hard water would deposit on the lead and form a protective coating. Nevertheless, lead shavings were used as a seasoning on food. You may say that's horrendously stupid in a society that knows about lead poisoning, but then there's cigarettes today.

Handwavium? I like it. I like it more than "unobtanium."

The Language abilities of Star Trek computers are extremely advanced compared to today's latest and greatest. Of course most of the things in this article are only inklings, on their way but nowhere near what Star Trek showed. But I find many people are fooled by the usefulness of Siri et al. into thinking that real language processing and synthesis is only N years away. Talking with Siri is like using an old text adventure game: you put in words, it filters those and matches them to a small set of commands, and if that fails it returns an error dressed up as a polite English phrase. The biggest advancement is speech recognition and speech synthesis, which are indeed very good at this point. But this only deals with the physical forms of words at the level of phonetics. All higher linguistic levels (phonology, morphophonology, morphology, morpho-syntax, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) are woefully closed off to the electronic brains we use today. With our current language technologies, we are only about half a step above text.

If we combine the two statistics, we should arrive at a useful number. I have done the maths, and it seems that 105% of Americans are uninformed about the cloud. But now, being an American, I am forced to look at myself in this new light. I, for one, have looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow it's clouds' illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all.