dropping sequences

Hi,

I have a database with a few tables in it (this is just a "learning"
database). Originally I set these tables up with sequences on them
which increment the primary key of the table when a new record is
inserted. I would like to drop these sequences.

1. First I wanted to copy the database to a different database so that
the original could remain untouched if a screw something up. The way I
did this was to use pg_dump on the original database and then load the
export file into the new database. Is there another (not necessarily
better) way to do this, such as from within psql without dumping to the
file system? (Copying directly from one DB to another.)

2. Now I would like to drop the sequences, but I am told that I cannot:

"ERROR: Cannot drop sequence news_news_id_seq because table news column
news_id requires it
You may drop table news column news_id instead"

So, is the solution to drop the column first, then drop the sequence,
then re-create the column by using ALTER TABLE ? Something tells me
that this will cause a problem due to referential integrity constraints
that I set up on some of the tables' primary keys.

Pardon if these are newb questions but my experience has been in MySQL
which does not offer these features, so I am trying to learn how to use
them.

Regards,

Erik