He probably said that because slashdot submitters quite frequently confuse patent applications with the actual patent approvals. Readers do it even more frequently. Of course these days the application for and the granting of a patent seem to go hand in hand.

Uh? They reported it when they could have hid it, with essentially no risk to themselves. Doesn't that count as a damn?

I think Eliza may have you cornered on this one, AC.

(For the record, the recommendation originates from the NYC Health Department, and Bloomberg points out that you can still easily carry two smaller drinks.)

RTFS again. There was an ethically questionable engineer at Google who was responsible for collecting and retaining the unnecessary data. If memory serves, he wanted to do statistical analysis on the passwords he was collecting. Eventually, Google fessed up to it, even though they could have just covered it up and no one would ever have known. The only possible question is why his superiors took so long to deal with the problem once they knew about it, and my guess would be that they wanted to give him a chance to clean up his act before sacking him. He didn't, so they did.

In short, they're squeaky-clean on this issue, and any efforts to get it investigated further are unjustifiable.

Cool. I would finally get a chance to try out my HERF gun.

I think you're missing some of the point, then. The story isn't just that scientific education doesn't appear to sway convictions, it's that scientific education also appears to make them more pronounced.

There are all kinds of subsets available, actually. You can get a microarray analysis done for a couple hundred dollars; that can screen for most hereditary diseases for which the mutations are known. You can even have full-exome sequencing done (all of the parts of DNA that we know turn into protein sequences), which will tell you your hair colour, but can't detect fragile X syndrome. And you can even ask to have only certain cherry-picked parts of your genome sequenced (in fact there are some parts we still can't sequence because they're so repetitive and meaningless)—but there's still a fixed cost overhead.

The thousand-dollar genome is mostly a benchmark, not necessarily something that will be medically applicable exactly as sold. And yes, these are only chemical costs, not the equipment; it's assumed in how the question is posed that any company that could offer such a service would very quickly recoup costs on volume alone.

Fortunately, it's not very likely, at least not in the US. Hiring discrimination is a sacred cow due to the civil rights movement, and genetic screening of employees has been illegal since 2003.

Some day I'm going to print stickers that say "Blame it on the epigenome" and hand them out at conferences.

It's a non-standard use of the word, but actually I really have to disagree with you. Genes evolve to meet new demands in response to stimuli. The rate of directed evolution (and conservation) can be measured (and it has been) by comparing large data sets, yielding (for proteins) a ratio between synonymous and non-synonymous mutations. If anything can be considered biological devolution—besides certain Star Trek plots that actually require knowledge of information not stored in the genome (in fact, it would require time travel)—then surely it must be the random mutations inflicted upon genes that are no longer under any selection pressure; i.e. those that do not convey any evolutionary benefit.

Our genome is riddled with such material; only about 9% of the total mass of unique DNA carries information of any importance. Amongst that huge amount of nothingness are many pseudogenes (a broad term describing all sequences with proper starts and stops but aren't expressed) that correspond to functional genes in other, related species. Many animals, for example, have completely lost the ability to process certain foods simply because they didn't need them.

In the future we may very well lose a lot of capabilities to respond to pressure as a result of the absence of selection. I could see the human immune system and genes that support the musculature degrading substantially, for example, to the point that our distant descendants would be severely disadvantaged over athletes of today. This loss of capacity, when considered from the long perspective of the genome, is also a form of devolution, as the species no longer has the ability to respond to dangers as it once did; on a similarly larger scale we'd be less well-suited to handle our ever-changing world. Tens if not hundreds of millions of years of work could very go well the drain in a couple of thousand years of such stagnation.

Technically it's progress, but a cathedral is being demolished.