So? He's still using a government-approved organization. Real libertardian would set up his own DNS root server and ask their followers to use it.

This. I first became fluent in _written_ English (which is not that bad) but then I actually started _speaking_ it. And I'm still surprised from time to time by pronunciations.

Law enforcement? I think you're confused. This unit is created specifically to commit crimes!

So they've finally realized that OpenStack is just a death-knell for the IaaS industry. It commoditizes it and enables a race to the bottom, like it earlier happened with web hosting and later with individual VPS hosting. A couple of years from now and we're going to be swamped by small companies offering OpenStack-based clouds.

And so instead of trying to capitalize on their own server production unit and compete on price, Dell's going to try and differentiate themselves using some half-assed proprietary offerings. And since every company trusts Dell enough to build their critical infrastructure on Dell's proprietary systems then it certainly is going to be a smash hit in the industry. Not.

That canard is getting old.

These days I can easily give each user a separate server, even several servers. They are freakingly cheap - I can buy decent compute nodes for a $5k apiece (and it's going to be much more powerful than a mainframe partition of the same cost). Sure, there's also the question of shared storage/database, but that is also readily solved by a multitude of NAS/DB vendors. About administration costs - it's very hard to find mainframe specialists. So just their salary can outweigh every cost advantage of a 'single' mainframe system.

I actually don't really care about manufacturing quality as long as it is good enough. I feel that we should design systems that can tolerate failures rather than trying to design infallible systems.

I certainly would prefer a $10k Dell server to a multi-$100k IBM shitframe. And then add redundancy with a couple of other $10k servers from Dell.

I've seen too much crap about the 'reliability' of big iron in the real world. Out here, outside of marketing brochures, IBM hardware and software quite often fails - and usually with much worse consequences. See, most people expect commodity hardware to fail and _plan_ for it.

Actually, that's incorrect. Individual variations account for the amount of alcohol and time required to reach certain BAC level, but they have little effect on the resulting impairment.

0.00 is unreasonable (you're hitting endogenous alcohol background). 0.01 is prohibition level. 0.05 is already close to the upper scale of reasonableness.

Again, we CAN describe the function of about 70% of junk - it simply wants to replicate itself as much as possible. Google for "retrotransposons". Non-junk actually _has_ a purpose - it's used to encode the cell functions.

There is junk DNA. Read about SINEs and LINEs for a start.

I'm extremely familiar with genetic algorithms. Pure junk is generally useless because you're no better off than starting from scratch. You need at least something that is _almost_ junk or a way to create imperfect copies of existing functional elements within a genome.

Unsurprisingly, there are mechanism for both of these. And they don't need junk DNA - bacteria can evolve just fine and they have virtually no junk DNA.

Then the question: "why junk DNA?" and the answer so far is that it has negligible fitness penalty, any observable effects become noticeable only when DNA grows to humongous size (20-30Gb) because it takes very long to replicate it.

Next question: "Then why does this plant has so little junk?". That's probably because it has some rogue transposable element that chews portions of DNA randomly.

Oh no. Not ENCODE junk again.

ENCODE detected that at some point in the life of cell about 80% of DNA was translated into RNA. That doesn't mean it's functional in any way - it's just transcribed. Also, I'd like to see your source for the 50% evolutionary conservation of junk DNA - the top estimate is about 15% of the whole genome ( http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/349505/description/Reports_of_junk_DNAs_demise_were_based_on_junky_logic_and_dubious_definitions ).

Wrong! Most of junk DNA is... wait for it... JUNK!

We can tell the composition of the junk for approximately 66% of the human genome. There is a small amount of regulatory elements mixed with all this junk, but the junk itself is not necessary for anything.

Even without the extreme examples such as bladderwort we readily observe 10x variability in the amount of DNA between fairly recently separated species.

Lots of tissue media (and enzymes) are so expensive because there's no large-scale demand for them, so vendors have to recoup their R&D by jacking up the prices. I know for a fact that a couple of very expensive enzymes used in preparation of DNA libraries are sold with 20x markup. Yet it's barely enough to get even because it took tens of millions of dollars to develop them.

I used to work in a company that grows animal tissue cultures. You certainly CAN grow lots of tissue types without horse serum or any animal-related products. In fact, lots of lab protocols require that.