Having the exact stream of bytes of an ARM program will do you no good if you place it in an x86 CPU and expect it to run. Or even one variant of an ARM to another with different I/O, timers, etc. Simply transferring entire genomes between far distant organisms on Earth won't work. When the organisms are distant enough from each other there is variance in the code itself (stop codons, etc) and the machinery the specific code will be manipulating must be there to be controlled. Ribosomes vary, organelles certainly vary. In fact it's rather presumptive of us to assume the genetic mechanism must be DNA or RNA when there are probably all sorts of other mechanisms that would work suitably. Even presuming life had a common origin and there was some event that seeded Mars with Earth bacteria (or the other way around) a few billion years ago, doesn't mean there is the slightest chance it's in any way compatible with anything that could be found on Earth today. Very different environments will select for very implementations over those billions of years.

The story is casting too wide a net in simply saying "Medical Apps". Apps which help me record or log or communicate should not be strongly regulated (other than following HIPAA guidelines). They are no different than if I were to manually keep a journal or call the doctors office. There is nothing "new" about them other than the convenience. But apps which attempt to diagnose, analyze, or treat an illness should be regulated. Bugs or outright fraud in their capability can directly and seriously impact my health.

Of course you can use YOUR own personal camera to record people in public. But you have no right to take over and use Apple's display computer cameras and use it to record people and upload to the web. This wasn't art, it was rude. We decry the loss of privacy in this country and yet when it's done for "art" some people are shocked that anybody could be upset.

The vast majority of posts I see point out the obviousness of rooting your phone and running any of a number ad-blockers and how great they are. That's no different than someone responding to a regular Joe's desktop Linux complaint with a "Duh, change your config, rebuild your kernel and move on....". You've just lost the average person who might otherwise be interested in playing. The VAST majority of Android users have absolutely no ability or interest in having to "root" their phone, finding a good ad-blocker, and then install it. There are millions of people having a less-than-steller experience, probably not even realizing what's going on and the best answer from the tech community isn't "Let's fix the process", or even "Let's exhort Google to fix the process", but rather an almost patronizing rolling of the eyes and an explanation of how "easy" it is to fix.

Gee a few months ago, they were not taking Apple seriously... Apple "...is not having an impact on Nintendo... I’ve seen data that suggests that while consumers are constantly downloading apps, they play with them for a few times and then they are moving on to the next thing,” Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America’s president, told Kotaku. “Clearly it doesn’t look like their platform is a viable profit platform for game development because so many of the games are free versus paid downloads.” "iPhone and iPad not viable gaming platforms", "Apple games are not even a mouthful" A year ago, Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo was argued that iPhones and Nintendo products were not competitors because they appealed to different people.

This is soooo clearly an April Fools joke. It's nowhere to be found except on blogs and only on April 1st. The name is clearly meant to be bad English for "I like cartoons", becomes "I lika cartoonen" becomes "Ilkka Karttunen".

I think you confuse the point of building a Difference Engine from LEGO.

It was not built in mockery of the original to somehow be useful to compute lower order polynomials. It was built as a serious effort to see how far I could push the limits of a plastic construction toy.

The real Babbage machine is a wonder of any age. The LEGO one, not so much. But it certainly makes people think and it certainly encourages a sense of wonder of what can be accomplished with ordinary things when you set your mind to it.