SSNs are recycled. They're only unique among the living.

We DO understand what 60% of the genome is doing. 45% of it is parasitic. Do you really think that LINEs, parasitic DNA strands that make copies of themselves over and over again, are NOT junk?

Fugu "thrive" in the sense that they're alive and reproducing. Fugu are not dying off. Fugu are not endangered. Fugu are not at an evolutionary dead end suffering under a genetic legacy that's handicapping them, like pandas or the various all-female species of parthenogenic whiptail lizard are. Like I said, thriving. The only thing that threatens them at all: their tasty lip-numbing tetrodotoxin convinces humans to turn them into sushi.

Why do fugu (390 megabases) get by with 3.5 times less DNA than zebrafish (1.4 gigabases)? Why do fruit flies eliminate non-coding "junk" DNA from their genome 40 times faster than crickets do? (And, for that matter, why do both fruit flies AND crickets AND most eukaryotes excise DNA from their genome at all?) Why does the common onion, Allium cepa (15876 megabases), need 2.3 times more DNA than its close relative the Blue Spear chive, Allium altyncolicum (6860 megabases)? Does bear's garlic, Allium ursinum (30870 megabases), have extra DNA stashed away in preparation for a future alien invasion that will sap the precious bodily fluids from lesser garlics? No. If two closely related Allium species both live in the same area, and look similar, and taste similar, and their cells have a similar appearance under a microscope, and they are equally prolific in their environment... but one has twice as much DNA as the other... then by definition at least half of the larger wad of DNA must be redundant. Maybe not inert, but "junk" in the sense of duplicate or obsolete functionality that doesn't need to be there to grow a successful, sexually mature plant that can compete in the real world.

In short, "junk DNA" is basically a shorthand for "DNA that could be deleted from all individuals in a species without harming the reproductive fitness of those individuals". By this standard, LOTS of DNA is junk -- at least the part that's known to be parasitic (45% of the human genome), and probably a lot more.

Are there regions of non-coding DNA, in the 40% of the human genome as yet not understood by humanity, that confer a benefit to their hosts? Almost certainly. But as a percentage of the genome, the 80% claim in the ENCODE press release is f***ing ridiculous. As best as I can tell, the ENCODE papers are using a shotgun approach that would categorize known parasites like LINEs, ERVs, and transposons as "functional". In one sense, such DNA is not passively sitting there, so it's not "junk" in the sense of being "inert". But for all the spinning of its little wheels, it's doing nothing to help you survive. Sure sounds like junk to me.

Beyond that... fine, call me a moron if you like, but PZ Myers is a Ph.D. professor of biology who studies genetics. This is his area of expertise, and his day job is to teach this stuff to people. If you don't have a Ph.D. in biology, maybe you shouldn't dismiss him as a moron; instead, shut up and watch his video. You might learn something, instead of emotionally flipping out and calling people names, as if "nuh uh, you're a poopy-head" were a valid form of argument. (Hmm... are you sure you're not a Creationist? Flipping out and calling people names is a rather Creationist style of "debate". Although there's such a high background level of it on Slashdot I'm not sure my priors are sound on the matter...)

Yes, we HAVE confirmed that most DNA is junk. See this talk by biologist PZ Myers. (Money quote starts at 35:20.) Cyberax's figures are an exaggeration, but... roughly 5% is functional (protein-coding, rRNA, tRNA, microRNA), 10% is structural (centromeres and telomeres), 45% of the human genome is known parasitic DNA (LINEs, SINEs, endogenous retroviruses, transposons), and only 40% is unexplained. As PZ Myers asks, if the remaining 40% is all functional... why do onions need ten times as much as humans need, and why can the fugu pufferfish thrive without any of it?

If I recall correctly from Jared Diamond's Collapse, the non-tonal Polynesian languages originated in South Asia but were pushed out by tonal ones, e.g. Vietnamese, who were themselves pushed out by Han expansion from China.

The word pride arose in response to what came before: back when it was illegal to serve alcohol to a homosexual, gay bars were regularly raided by the police for the purpose of listing the patrons in the newspaper the next day to shame them. "Pride" in this context means "I'm not afraid of telling everyone, even if it hurts me in the process", i.e. neutralizing the threat by making shame impossible.

This is not quite right. Secret key crypto will be fine if quantum computing becomes ubiquitous (or if we find out that P=BQP), but P=NP is a vastly more powerful result, to the extent that it would shatter secret key crypto as well. P=NP means that you can pluck answers to a question out of the aether with no more difficulty than checking if one random input answers the question. So if you know how to calculate "lambda key: ciphertext.decrypt(AES, key).matches(English)", then by P=NP magic you already know the list of all 256-bit AES keys that satisfy that calculation. (Substitute "English" for any human language or binary file format you prefer.) You would still have the problem of sorting through all the candidate plaintexts, but if the ciphertext is longer than 256 bits then the list of candidates will be very short. Only one time pads (key length equals plaintext length) would remain truly safe if P=NP, because an n-bit ciphertext could represent any possible n-bit plaintext, i.e. the P=NP magic doesn't teach you anything you didn't already know.

If anything it's the other way around: a firewall is designed for security, whereas NAT is designed for functionality. For instance, all but the cheapest NATs inspect packets and automatically open holes to the LAN for compatibility with FTP, IRC DCC, various IM protocols, etc.

Yes, we are. As a white US resident, I've never had to worry about selecting a wardrobe that carefully avoids any chance of being mistaken for a criminal (e.g. avoiding hoodies, no matter how convenient they are); and as a male, I've never had to make an on-the-spot calculation of whether or not the guy entering the elevator is going to use the confined space to sexually harass me or bully me into accepting a sexual proposition.

Only in rare cases does privilege come with a special handshake -- it's often the mere absence of bias. In the context of discrimination, "privilege" is a term of technical jargon; I strongly recommend you read Of Dogs and Lizards: A Parable of Privilege for a good explanation of what "privilege" means here.

TCP has already been replumbed numerous times since its creation. Take a look at the after-market congestion avoidance algorithms that have been bolted on, or new wire-level features like timestamps (now ~mandatory), window scaling (now ~mandatory), SACK, and ECN. If AQM takes off, it'll simply be the latest in a line of fixes that's kept TCP working across 37 years of Moore's Law.

No, the car gets you to a parking spot. In a big city (e.g. I live in SF), that could still be a few blocks away from your destination.

"People of the book" specifically means Abrahamic religions: Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and arguably offshoots like Baha'i. The "book" is the Torah, a.k.a. the first 5 books of what Christians call the Old Testament. The Islam founding legend says Muhammed was visited by an angel who told him "yup, everything the Jews believe is true, but here's some more stuff God forgot to tell the Jewish prophets".

Today's hatred and mistrust between Jews and Muslims... well, Israel/Europe/US and Muslims... is fairly recent; Muslims and Mizrahi Jews living in modern-day Israel got along reasonably well until the 20th century kicked over the anthill. The modern insanity is almost entirely due to ham-handed mismanagement of the Palestinian Mandate after the Ottoman Empire fell in WWI: first by Britain, whose administration was rotten enough that it triggered an armed Arab revolt and made the WWII Allies locally quite unpopular, then after Britain handed off the festering mess in the aftermath of WWII, the UN made it worse as they promptly decided to forcibly segregate the Palestinian Mandate's population into "Jews" and "not Jews", i.e. the "Trail of Tears" approach (instead of e.g. setting up a one-state secular constitutional democracy with a liberal immigration policy for Jewish diaspora). The Middle East would probably not be a powder keg today if WWI had gone just a little differently and, say, the Ottoman Empire had lingered on until after the Holocaust.

Google's privacy policy says they won't sell your information to third parties, and their stated business model is all about throwing algorithms at big piles of aggregated data and never having a human look at any of it. Do you really think humans at Google even have the desire to look at your data, nevermind the access to do it without getting fired on the spot? What is your threat model? What abuse are you defending against?

So don't use those. Unlike the old IE lockin, it's pretty obvious from the "-webkit-*" prefix that they're Webkit-specific. We aren't going to raise a new generation of web developers who think that "-webkit-*" properties are standard CSS and it's those other non-Webkit browsers who are being weird and icky for not implementing a "-webkit-*" property correctly. (Ditto "-moz-*" for that matter.)

This is a good point, one that I nearly brought up in my original post. I was in a similar boat, due to Asperger's as much as to the obvious reason.

Please note that "sodomy" means radically different things in different states. For example, in most states it includes oral sex.