So what you're saying is... you didn't RTFA? (limp-wristed rimshot here)

I think what UCFFool was going for would translate into "what if you have insufficient after-the-fact interest to do another limited run at an affordable level?" This would be especially problematic with printing, where there are really deep bulk discounts.

Pretty sure this calls for more tinfoil than that.

I think you'll find that's .xoxo

I'm pretty sure this is like when Google bid pi billion dollars for Nortel's patents. It looks to me like agree with you that the TLD namespace is being polluted. If they get .lol, it'll prove the system is stupid, if not outright broken.

There aren't any samples in the "ASCII porn" article on Wikipedia, though.

The argument I'm making is that mutation contrary to fitness is occurring, it's just that the stimulus is in the very likely (near?) future, not the present. Think of a plant that loses the ability to handle cold temperatures because it goes through a few centuries of warmth—the coldness is a predictable part of its environment, but because it got lucky and was out of it for a moment, the mutations were non-deleterious at the time. The warm climate was only a temporary part of its environment. The series of generations doesn't need to be extremely brief, but 'environment' needs to be redefined to be broader if there's evidence the organism has specialized genes for handling different conditions that would take more than one generation to observe. To my understanding, this sort of long-term epigenetic variability is typical of the tomato for factors like soil quality, sunlight quality, summer temperatures, and the duration and harshness of winter. It's not very hard to imagine a selection mechanism at work for needing to keep up with predictable (or at least common) changes in one's immediate environment that may prove deleterious to biological fitness.

Civilization isn't a long-term environment, either, and even if the musculature idea was a little far-fetched, I truly believe that the immune system is at risk of some degradation if our living conditions continue to become more sterile. Suppose we perfect air filtering, and can guarantee that no one breathes anything but pure air, with its familiar nitrogen/oxygen/water/carbon/argon/etc. ratios. (More cynically, imagine we destroy the atmosphere on Earth and have to wear oxygen tanks.) Ignoring disease, this would severely stunt the body's ability to cope with foreign matter in the lungs and bloodstream. The dependence on the absence of such irritants, however, would just be artificial; such a human would only be able to survive on that filtration system, and wouldn't be able to handle present-day Earth, or the atmosphere of another planet that happened to be non-toxic and had a decent amount of oxygen, much less Earth's own atmosphere if the people in this little musing cleaned it up to conditions that their ancestors (us) considered bearable.

So—just because you don't need it right now doesn't mean it isn't obvious you won't need it later. From the perspective of the entire history of the species, I would call the formation of such a dependence, primarily characterized by loss of gene function as it is, a form of devolution. The amount of information contained in the genome is being reduced and replaced with noise.

Unrelatedly, I'm not sure I agree with your point #2 very much. Ignoring epigentic annotations, the nucleotides themselves just appear to be filler (perhaps the fact that I was only talking about As, Cs, Gs, and Ts wasn't clear in my post.) They mutate too rapidly to be under selection. Perhaps the sequences are evolutionarily constrained so that hairpins can form for pairing up chromosomes during reproduction, but I distinctly recall a Nature paper from a few years ago making the case that the primary purpose of such sequences was large-scale chromatin remodelling, in that it gave enough slack so that every promoter could be oriented toward the outside of a loose sphere.

No, no, no – just use a text browser, obviously...

Did it? Okay. I guess that's something.