Right, which is why states with abstinence-only sex ed have the highest incidence of teen pregnancy...

From everything I've read about dirty bombs, their radiological damage is negligible...it's all about creating panic.

They're awesome. Fuck the Cards.

Please compare the kinetic energy of a swung hammer vs a speeding car. I'll wait.

(a) Sorry, no. Registration does not affect your rights/ability to own or shoot a gun UNLESS you're not supposed to have one in the first place, just like backgrounds checks do now. Unless you're advocating for an/all people to be able to own a gun, you are incorrect.

Also, assuming you (yes, YOU) are legally allowed to purchase a gun, registration would make 0 difference in your ability to own/fire a gun.

(b) Seeing as there is no registration for firearms in the US, I fail to see how you can reach that conclusion. Secondly, registering of cars/licensing of drivers works pretty damn well. Get pulled over without a license, go to jail. Get pulled over in a car that's not registered to you (i.e. stolen), go to jail.

Yes, JUST LIKE CARS. Dangerous items should be registered so as to keep them out of the hands of crazies/incapable people.

Registering guns does not reduce your right to bear or shoot guns. At all.

I'm pretty sure those guys are still civilians...right?

Um, I don't think there is such a thing as a non-civilian, non-government job...

Meh, it can actually be pretty useful once you get to where you can deal with both visual fields.

Get used to looking through a scope with both eyes open, you get zoom detail from one and and wide-field/situational awareness from the other.

That repertoire turns out to be more intriguing than Thompson could
have imagined. Although the configuration program specified tasks for
all 100 cells, it transpired that only 32 were essential to the
circuit's operation. Thompson could bypass the other cells without
affecting it. A further five cells appeared to serve no logical
purpose at all--there was no route of connections by which they could
influence the output. And yet if he disconnected them, the circuit
stopped working.

It appears that evolution made use of some physical property of these
cells--possibly a capacitive effect or electromagnetic inductance--to
influence a signal passing nearby. Somehow, it seized on this subtle
effect and incorporated it into the solution.

-------------

Another challenge is to make the circuit work over a wide temperature
range. On this score, the human digital scheme proves its
worth. Conventional microprocessors typically work between -20 0C and
80 0C. Human designers set the clock so that chip components have
enough time to settle into a digital value. As many computer hackers
know, they can turn up the clock speed if they keep the temperature of
the microprocessor low because the transistors settle into their on or
off states more quickly when cold.

Thompson's evolved circuit only works over a 10 0C range--the
temperature range in the laboratory during the experiment. This is
probably because the temperature changes the capacitance, resistance
or some other property of the circuit's components. Whatever the
cause, this is a serious drawback. If the circuit needs a temperature
controller to enable it to operate, then it is no longer a cheap,
low-power device. But evolution could come to the rescue here as well.
In a future genetic algorithm, Thompson plans to score circuits not
only on how well they perform an electronic task, but also on how well
they cope with temperature variation. Evolution might, for example,
create a design that includes a set of subcircuits each of which
operates over a different temperature range. If this fails to solve
the problem, Thompson will try giving the FPGA a clock. But he won't
tell the circuit what to do with it. "It will be a resource--we'll see
what use evolution makes of it," he says.

Junk DNA is basically this:

http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall11/CSCI-GA.2965-001/geneticalgex

We are very complex machines with LOTS of unexpected connections. Take out one little bit of "junk" DNA, the whole thing collapses because of the utterly bizarre inter-dependencies that have evolved over millions of years.

**THUNKA CHUNKA THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK**

Man those things were so fucking loud.

PS - Lameness filter, I'm yelling on purpose!

Enjoy hell on Earth! :)

Fuck that. That's the reason I have a gun.

Not to take food from other people and become a warlord, but to off myself if civilization falls apart. No desire to star in a real life version of "The Road", thank you very much!