I figure the shit will hit the fan after the next election.

Am I 'one of those people'?
Our experiences differ. I prefer email. Text messages are for hooking up down town.
Are you 'one of those people' who think that anyone who doesn't do things the way you do them is 'one of those people'?
With a smart phone you can communicate how you like no matter which one of 'those people' you happen to be.

Pretty much.

Welcome to the latest and most provactive episode of: government v.s. the people.

Who does the government work for these days?

It's the beginning of the end.

Yes. It's a hot product because it does a lot more than make phone calls. It brings Internet communications to your shirt pocket.

I rarely use mine for phone calls.

You mean the atheists runing around killing abortion doctors on the command of no god whatsoever, or the atheists blowing themselves up in the name of no higher order?

Or do you mean that the bad things that were not done in the name of a god are the fault of all people that don't believe in gods?

There is no such thing as atheist dogma, so there is nothing for militant atheists to be militant about. There are non-religious dogmas, such as Stalinism. Please explain how all atheists are responsible for, or support these. You know, like how all Catholics support bigotry because they subscribe to Catholocism.

There's no good reason to do that. Storage is dirt cheap. If you don't own a real computer you might find it useful. If you aren't storing it on your own system though, you should reconsider calling it 'your' media, because you don't actually possess it.

I had a girl say that to me once when I asked to close an account. Wanted 8 bucks as a service charge. I said, "OK, never mind that, just give me all the money." She laughed and complied.

I have an issue with all Sony products that I call 'Kiss My Ass syndrome" It seems to apply to all products manufactured by Sony, manifesting itself by my reaction to the concept of investing money in that company, a company that has repeatedly displayed a disdain for it's customers. Nope, done with Sony.

I don't understand that either. My 76 yo mother uses Linux with no problems, because she isn't net savvy she was always screwing her windows install.

Personally I work with and use windows personally and have for 20 years. Basically the whole run. I'm sure I've had to perform re-installs, but the only times I specifically remember doing that is setup runthroughs on new installations.

Basically both ends of the spectrum heard from.

We hate to see our children get injured, so we wrap them in wool, then bubble wrap, with a layer of nerf for good measure. We put them in schools that won't crush their fragile egos, declaring everyone's a winner. These pampered, protected children grow up into risk averse adults. Without getting them killed, there's a lot to be said for teaching kids and adults to take chances, push beyond their limits and discover both the cost and value of living a larger life.

The junk is fast becoming an area of serious study. the fact that it doesn't encode protein seems to belie the fact that it controls morphology, gene expression, and in fact looks to be fractal in nature and incredibly information rich.

For 1, maybe even 3 or 5 genes, not 200.

A whale and a bat breed?... that is just sick beyond imagining.

Sorry, there've been bats since the early Eocene around 52 million years ago, and since the ancestor of cetaceans came from land around 30 million years ago (and had no reason for echolocation), the trait was developed as they evolved into ocean going creatures while bats were happily echo locating the whole while. Sorry, interesting hypothesis... how did you account for echo locating genes getting back from cetacean to land dwelling animals?

Actually xeno-biology is fascinating. You could base information encoding structures and chemistries in endless ways, and it's possible to imagine the DNA role being taken by all kinds of other carbon based structures (include complex sugars.) This all speaks to organic chemistry like our own. There's no reason that far more exotic chemistries that don't live in liquid water or require fatty acids couldn't exist, even complexes of other states of matter (plasma, or the thin skin of a neutron star where neutron degeneration could create phase changes,) Many of these ideas have been the source of good science fiction, and the well has hardly been tapped. Still looking for forward to the possibility of exotic life on Titan!