The point I was making was that over 260 million years, carbon atoms would have experienced events sufficiently energetic to allow exchange with silicon over several FEET of distance. The events that cause chemical damage to the DNA are considerably less energetic, and they can occur anywhere in the specimen, not just on the surface where the specimen is exposed to rock. Any sample which is old enough to be a fossil is going to have meaningless DNA.
Over the course of 260 million years, all information content in the DNA would be lost; there might (if it were preserved in Amber, and not in something silicous) be things in the sample that looked like DNA, however, in a process very similar to what happens to old magnetic storage media (random bit flips eventually destroy the data) random chemical changes in the DNA would, absolutely and under any circumstance short of a vacuum at 2 Kelvin, have eroded or altered enough of the bases (after 260 million years, all of them) that recovering any information about the original sequence would be impossible.
Before anyone even starts with the Jurassic park stuff, it is not possible.
260 Million years is long enough for every carbon atom in a piece of bone several feet thick to exchange for silicon. Time(absolute) =~ 20,000 Million yrs.; we're talking about 1% of the age of the universe here, guys. It is a very, very long time.
So, even if you did recover something that looked like a biological molecule from a sample of this thing, all of the information content would have been destroyed long, long ago.
Scorpion growth factors, on the other hand, are well understood. In a strict sense, genetically modified scorpions are more like a modern scorpion that the one in the article. However, they are nearly as cool, they give you some idea of how such a creature may have lived, and you can feed fools to them when they've foiled your plans for the last time.
So, if anyone wants an eight foot long scorpion, I've started making them and I - Get away! No, no, I am your master! Aieeeee!
Anyway, this critter is weird but it pales in comparison to the real freaky shit in the burgess shale. If you want to know what body types evolution has abandoned (but might take up elsewhere in the galaxy?) check this out. It is a must read for anyone with an interest in writing 'hard' science fiction with aliens in it.
"Look, if he was dying, he wouldn't bother to carve 'aarrggh'. He'd just say it!" - King Arthur Pendragon
The devices I've seen billed as "Mini PCs" are a bit smaller than normal laptops, I'd say about 8" x 8" x 3" (it's late, don't jump on me if I'm off.)
People in "industry" buy them, with 286 chips, because they want to make embedded devices but don't want to deal with firmware. I have some friends who make scientific instruments, they use them for this purpose as well.
The only use I can think of for something with about 1 Ghz of power - and it's a pretty strange one - is as a control system for really outre field analytical devices, if I wanted to make them portable. I'm talking about a device with really a lot of intelligence that is basically built into a laptop casing, with room to spare to make it a bit tougher.
The big problem with this, of course, is that anyone who is thinking of carrying around such a device (parts alone upwards of 30 grand, depending on what exactly it is, plus value added from being custom made by multiple PhDs) can get a laptop. It would seem to be much simpler to control the device from the laptop, like we allready do for the few devices that work this way.
For one thing, there is little point in doing sophisticated analysis in the field if you don't have a moniter to view the results.
"this bug should not have been there" rants don't count as a solution
You're artificially restricting the sphere of possible solutions to things that might help, which is intellectually honest. Shame on you.
In ancient Sumeria, they used to execute architects when the buildings that they constructed collapsed. By the same token, we should kill some people.
If we've learned one thing from the 20th century, it is that big government is inefficient. Therefore, the killings should be handled by the private sector.
The proceedings against MS are criminal, in addition to civil. In a criminal proceeding, the judge is perfectly justified in issueing fatwas against MS programmers who write buggy code - this is a well established precept of Sharia.
Thus, I've proven that the free market will take care of MS on it's own, punishing it for buggy programming - through highly paid mercenary assassins, with EULAs to kill.
I want to test and see if anyone reads their EULAs. Distribute a piece of software with an EULA that says, about halfway through-
"By installing this software, you agree to take up arms in defense of (company name), march to the fastness of her foe, and slaughter her enemies. Please register the software so that we can give you your orders."
My guess is that they filed this suit to drum up publicity for their technology; if you think of every hit against their webpage as a targeted advertisement striking a potential techie customer (slashdotters, no less! Raise your hand if you've bought something stupid in the last year), well, it becomes very cost effective.
Earlier, I said this doesn't raise any moral dilemmas - scratch that.
The abortion issue is a red herring - John & Jane (and Jill and Jacqueline) Mormon may get government sanction to adopt any aborted fetus they want in the state of Utah, by chucking them in one of these, but I doubt it.
However, I worry about extensive birth defects among babies birthed using this technique.
The evidence (search for string 'birth defects') is not as strong as I recall, but there is reason to believe that babies concieved by in vitro fertilisation - who are then transplanted into the womb of another woman - have higher birth-defect rates than other babies (this study was done in Australia, so maybe IFV agravates fetal alchohol syndrome.)
An artifical womb, which would, almost by definition, be a pretty imperfect copy the first time round, might have a hugely higher birth defect rate.
Be like me, enliven your sex life by discussing "flipper babies" instead of letting her go to sleep.
When the faculty are empowered - and I'm refering to the empowerment of cold, green, cash (for swimming in) - they can do as they please; which, when it comes to computers, is generally whatever their post docs, grad students and senior techs want (I'm a biologist.)
Often, at least here at Columbia, that means individual labs will just go out and buy a bunch of Intel machines on their own initiative, and put Linux on them. This has been going on for the past year or more, and Linux is starting to gain credence with the administration.
At a school where people don't have that kind of funding, individual groups don't have the resources to investigate, not just Linux but new avenues of procurement generally. As is too often the case, if you don't have the sugary wampum to evaluate the different vendors/solutions, you end up stuck with a bad deal.
Anyway, this is a problem that Linux people, especially those at academic instistutions, ought to be pursuing - I say this without bothering to look and see who's pursuing it and how, hoping that someone already familiar with the situation will respond by posting details.
Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that ill-will on the parts of some CS faculty towards some other CS faculty may be hampering the adoption of Linux by certain institutions.
You mean "deal with" in the mafioso sense, I presume.
I believe the presumption that the TV scumbags^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hindustry is working under is that they're going to shift over to digital TV (after delaying it for as long as possible since they get some kind of deal on spectrum until it comes about) and control redistribution with some kind of watermark.
My presumption is that they have achieved sublime mastery of the path of the Dodo. In the case of music, or movies, or comic books, you can say, redistrubition on the Internet is free advertising, and to a certain extent that is true, the MPAA and RIAA's profits may drop, but they're an organisation of producers (in the studio sense) as well as distributors; they actually make what is, for better or worse, our culture, which means society is their bitch. The individual people presently in control of movies and music can jockey for position in "the new order", and some of them may fall, but the music industry is not going anywhere.
The TV stations, and the networks, really, are not production groups. They subcontract production to TV studios with whom they are, in a large part, in an adversarial relationship. The TV studios, who actually make TV programs, are going to continue to find ways to make money - people want TV, and if the revenue streams of those companies are seriously threatened, society will accept whatever terms TV producers care to name. Another poster suggested streaming content with commercials from your web site - that is a good idea, but if the studio that actually makes Buffy is going to do that, why would they cut in Warner Brothers? Once they've done that, why broadcast the show at all?
The TV broadcasters, on the other hand, own nothing but a distribution monopoly. Should that monopoly pass away, they are in way more trouble than the people who actually make content.
One of the other posters said that TV isn't going anywhere in the next decade. He's right, but a decade, while it's forever is circuit design, is not very long in the lives of the TV moguls who see their family fortunes threatened.
The efforts by content distributors to have draconian controls installed in all personal electronics are going to get worse and worse. Our best hope is that they don't have the good sense to offer IBM and Panasonic the one thing that might make them go along with a plan to shift over to a DRM-enabled mandatory hardware standard - crass bribes of huge amounts of cash money.
To a University, which is a very conservative institution, most of the time, the risk of being sued, and losing, is simply untenable. Especially when you consider the staggering damages that might potentially be awarded - how much is something private "worth," if it has been released into the public domain at no profit for the party releasing it?
The same is true of venture capitalists. If I have a good idea, my ability to get backing is in a lot of danger if there are people waiting in the wings with lawsuits. Backing a biotech venture is pretty risky business anyway - adding in a 5% chance that, even if my method is teneable, it is going to be nuked, or the profits all siphoned off, in the courts, is not helpful; if you take into account the chance of potentially ruinous additional delay is more like one in three, well, it is a serious issue.
It is very naive to say that only the final decisions which courts reach are relevant.
However, Biotech companies are interpreting these patents in a very broad way, as you can see from the article.
The more sophisticated the biotech you're trying to develop is, the more burdensome these low level, frankly not-very-clever patents become.
By analogy in software, imagine how difficult it would have been to write Kazaa if quick sort, merge sort and the binary search were all patented. Supposing you needed all of them (and that bubble sort wouldn't do, but stay with me), you'd need to enter into negotations with each of three different parties who hold the patents, and get permission from each of them, before you could finish Kazaa. Now, Kazaa, even though it maps to the set of integers, is a legitimate achievement; the people who wrote it deserve protection of their coding investment. Merge Sort, while a cute idea, is NOT. There is a qualitative difference between the two.
The biotech patents that are being issued are, likewise, so basic, and generated on such an industrial scale - companies just churn them out as fast as they can - that they are begining to hamper innovation.
These biotech companies often won't enter into negotations about selling their intellectual property. They're flush with cash, by and large, and if they don't know what their property is worth, why would they sell it?
When you're trying to develop something really new and sophisticated (the biotech equivalent of a complete piece of software) you may need literally dozens of tiny processes which someone has patented. Even if none of these patents will hold up in court, the risk that not one but several parties could sue you to defend their interests - usually in different jurisdictions! - makes the legal risks of implementing such a procedure prohibitive, even if none of these patents would really stand up in court.
I have to add that Columbia university, where I am a graduate student, makes more money from patents (in particular one, rather basic, biotechnology patent) than any other University in the world, including the combined patent income of the Universities of California (my BS & BA are from UCSC). That money is what pays my stipend.
Anyone else getting the feeling that this "story" is in fact disinformation that probably originates with RIAA?
Okay, yeah, that was my first thought, as well. Given all of the flak that MS has gotten over security holes, it is the sort of thing that a dumbshit trying to commit PR sabotage would try and pull off. If you recall that the RIAA let it be known (I don't think the bill was actually submitted) that they want protection against damages they inflict while hacking our hard drives, we can conclude that the RIAA is unscrupulous enough to try something like this.
Now, firstly, all of that is pretty circumstancial. Smoke and mirrors, hearsay.
The reason I don't think it was the RIAA is that it wasn't slick enough. The RIAA may not be smart, but they are smooth. Glossy and convincingly packaged. This story reads like a communication between a reporter and his friend, a second rate hacker in a garage somewhere (Hey, I know both of these people!) Second rate hacker says "Hey, I think I've found a security hole in Morpheus! Probably a worm." Reporter says "Can I print that?" Hacker says "Uh.... don't put my name on it."
Given the tenor of the article, the (frankly obscure) place it shows up, and the lack of exact quotes - an RIAA "agent" would have given smooth reading soundbytes - I think that it's simply a screw up, with no malicious or deceptive intent. Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
Now, I know, it is still possible that the RIAA was clever enough to figure this out, and figure the way to make it look convincing. It is also possible that this is some sort of RIAA test to see how much attention this thing attracts, before setting off real hoaxes. That, however, is paranoia.
On the other hand, just because you're paranoid..... doesn't mean that this won't give the RIAA ideas.
Are they sure the people didn't do it themselves?
on
Security Hole in Morpheus
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This story seems a little short on details, and in Kazaa - which runs on the same proprietary engine and, I assume, would be vulnerable to the same worms as Morpheus (of course, closed source => I don't know) - you can just check the box next to your hard drive and share all of its contents. Are they certain that the people they've found didn't do that? That said, maybe Kazaa can't get the worm, if there is one, but when I turn sharing off, my friend can't get any files from my computer (just checked now, he's on the phone) at all; if you're worried, have a friend query your username and see what they can get.
My inner paranoid, who left the fetal position to read the RIAA thread, thinks this is a music industry plot. I want to say that that is totally preposterous, but after they asked for legislation to make it legal for them to hack our hard drives, I can't totally dispel the suspicion.
I honestly don't think that users are going to stop pirating music when those 3 things are allowed.
I agree with you, in spite of the hard numbers that I've seen (I can't find them at the moment, sorry). People who pirate mp3s say that they would like to give money to the artists, something like 60% of them (us).
Why? Because they think people should go to church. Likewise, people who download mp3s, at least in a large part and I think in a majority, think that people who listen to music ought to support artists. That does NOT translate into action on their part; especially if you make it inconvenient, laborious or bothersome.
If it ever becomes really easy for me to give Eddie Vedder five bucks, I will; in fact, I think enough people, even though it would be a fraction of those who download his music, would do it for Eddie Vedder to live handomely, pay his recording fees, do publicity and support a small staff. However, even if it becomes really easy to do, it is never going to be anything like the racket that the RIAA is running now, and at least some industry people know it. The RIAA's only hope of survival is to destroy online music distribution entirely, which is what these insults.. I mean services, are a movement towards.
Like steering wheels, computer keyboards and exercise routines, engineering - this sort of engineering goes by various names that obscure its real nature - principles could be applied to make the video game controller less or non-harmful to use for seven hours a day. There may very well be a minor problem with the controllers themselves causing carpal tunnel, which should be studied, and if it is a problem, serious pressure needs to be brought to bear on the videogame industry to redesign the controllers, or to spend some of their massive profits to educate the public.
I seriously doubt that the vibration function has anything to do with it; it is more mild than what is experienced in those vibrating chairs, and they're safe. This BBC article is lazy, slipshod, sensationalist journalism reporting the ramblings of a lazy, incompetent, statistically ignorant medical doctor. They're proposing requiring warning labels (which I support generally, but they become meaningless if they're on everything) based on a single anecdote, a study with N = 1! It gives careful doctors with legimiate concerns and solid data a bad reputation when jerks like him are handed a soap box by the media.
Purcell likened it to a 20-year spring clean4ing. "It's time to get the garage cleaned out," he said.
Describing the state of computing today as unstable and unreliable, he said Microsoft chairman Bill Gates "is really annoyed by the incredible pain we put everyone through in computing."
Nothing I could say could possibly be more critical of microsoft than this article.
There is no way that this is an accident. I think we've clearly identified Mr. William Jackson as a seditious, anti-microsoft, commie terrorist;). Furthermore, if you call up his cv (really easy on google) you find that he's actually a defense industry journalist. We need congressional hearings to smoke these people out (YES I AM KIDDING.)
The thing I can't figure out is if Mr. Jackson had to quote Richard Purcell out of context to make him sound like that much of a fool, or if Richard Purcell really was stupid enough to say that. I'm sure the parts in quotations are accurate - but I'm not sure the subtext of "everything MS has done for the past 20 years is garbage, we're sorry" was present prior to Mr. Williams' editing.
I'd love to see the original transcript of the interview. The one thing I haven't been able to dig up in the last five minutes is Mr. Williams' e-mail. (If I look I find the "Gospel Communication Network" staff e-mails.) If it can be found, timothy or somebody should send him an e-mail asking for the transcript.
The Net is so choked with "advice" (advertisements) on how to make the computer end of your business somehow sabotage tolerant that it tends to drown out other related topics; they do this on google which means people are reading them.
Now, these are not problems that suggest knee-jerk, civil-rights-violating "solutions" that get us, slashdotters, up in arms. So, they are not as well covered here.
Solving these problems requires 1) a lot of money, and 2) action (presumably forced by regulation) on the part of a lot of conservative, well moneyed, powerful people. So, the political cost in proposing a real solution, say, to hacking vulnerabilities in our financial system, is a lot higher than the political cost of raising the sentences for "computer terrorists."
So, yes, the real problems recieve less attention from politicians. I don't think that is true of journalists or of the general public.
coaxed the stem cells into becoming kidney cells, and then "grew" them on a kidney-shaped scaffold.
What he is saying is that he made a kidney-shaped lump of meat out of kidney cells. This is NOT the same as a kidney, even if it squirts out "urine".
Some of these kidney cells have a directional orientation which you cannot duplicate with a scaffold - without getting too technical, these cells are adjacent to two tubes, one tube which carries proto-urine and one tube which carries blood. The cell has to know which is which.
Even if the cells don't know which is which, and if the tubes are there, they might still produce something that looks kinda like urine, just because they allowed the contents of the artificial proto-urine tube to become isotonic (equal in content of water and salt) with the blood. I will say - if what these kidneys made was "good" urine, the people at Advanced Cell Technology would release it's contents in a second. There is no way that anyone could steal whatever trade secrets they have based on the quality of the urine their artificial kidneys produce.
Kudos again to the New Scientist for raising these concerns.
The FCC is the Federal Communications Commission. If you are involved in a dispute that is, in any way, commercial, they will not involve themselves. You have to talk to the FTC. This can be a bit of a bitch if you're small time and buying spectrum, or the like, and got ripped off, because it is the FCC who actually knows what is going on, but since it is a service dispute they won't get involved.
The FTC is the Federal Trade Commission. They are a very different animal - for one thing, they are a hugely more powerful institution. They are the people you have to talk to if you want a dispute (like, say, MS Passport is mysteriously billing you for services you didn't buy) resolved without involving the courts; even if you are going to go to court you generally have to talk to the FTC first.
It is, perhaps unfortunately, very difficult to get the FTC's attention. I assume that the state attorneys general know this. Also, major decisions at the FTC are made by political appointees; the Bush administration has been seen by many attorneys general as being soft on MS.
A distinction can be drawn between modifying the gene itself, and modifying an organism by cloning a gene into it.
I believe that JJ is objecting to the patent of the gene, itself, which is a natural thing and not an invention. I still maintain that such a patent is a lesser degree of absurdity than a patent on U-234 would be; but I agree with JJ that they should not be issued.
However, I do think you should be able to patent technologies that utilise specific natural genes - including the "invention" of cloning a particular gene for a particular purpose. Patents like that, which bother some people, don't bother me, and they basically amount to a patent on the gene, at least from a commercial standpoint.
You can also patent a gene where you have modified the gene itself, of course, although what you ought to get a patent on is the modification (which is clearly an invention.)
Patents which actually are on a naturally occuring gene, directly, rather than an application of the gene, are an insult.
Likewise, patenting all possible screens for a gene that (say) causes kidney disease is also an insult - it is like patenting the desired end of catching mice, or patenting the act of immobilising a mouse's tail, rather than a design for a mousetrap.
This may all seem like splitting hairs, but the overextended patents that are being granted are having - I am concinced of this from (thank you, Mr. Anonymous) anecdotal evidence even though I do not have any hard numbers - a chilling effect on innovaction in certain areas. As more and more of these bad, over-reaching patents are issued, the effect they have can be expected to get worse.
I have always said that Patents on genes was [sic] a bad disision [sic]... scientists tried to patent Elements...
The logic on genes is different in a couple of respects; an individual gene is not a fundamental aspect of nature; genes are nearly infinite in number, as opposed to elements, which are finite; unlike elements, genes can be modified/designed. There are extensive and legimitate differences between a patent on a gene and a patent on an element.
I would say that patents on genes shouldn't be impossible, they should just be more difficult to get and more limited in scope. At the moment, I have considerable hearsay (that's the wrong term) evidence that patents on genes are stiffling innovation.
Before I start, I am a Structural Biologist and a Computational Biologist, I might also be called a Biochemist, Cell Biologist, Molecular Biologist, Biostatistician, Bioninformatician or Biophysicist. However, I am not a Geneticist.
The conclusion, reached by the Tribune, that profit motive is having a disastrous impact on genetics information sharing is reading too much into the article. I'd have to head into the university library to actually get a copy of the full text of the article, but most of what the article concludes is that geneticists feel worse about failure to share information than scientists in the other life sciences.
Geneticists were as likely as other life scientists to deny others' requests and to have their own requests denied. However, other life scientists were less likely to report that withholding had a negative impact on their own research as well as their field of research. - Jama article
Saying that geneticists feel worse about information sharing in their field - while certainly an interesting finding - is not sufficient to conclude that
The moneymaking potential of genetic discoveries is pushing an increasing number of scientists to withhold information about how they conducted research... - Tribune
Now, I will channel the spirit of Eric Cartman:
Bad Chicago Tribune! [Whack] That's my pot pie! [Whack] Gimme back my pie, you stupid paper! [Whack]
Assuming that it is counting which keys as well as how many - the little web page seems to indicate how many, and his friends seem to be having a race - I bet you could figure a way to tell good spellers from bad, using that information.
My guess would be that people who spell correctly would use uncommon letters with a certain relative frequency, but people who spell things wrong, frivelous [sic] for example, would use less uncommon letters and more common letters.
You'd need to do a lot of training - I'm sure that many poor spellers would "look like" people with good spelling and unusual word choice.
I don't want to be a spelling Nazi, I make occasional mistakes myself, but the editors of Slashdot need to start spellchecking their comments/articles. It isn't like any of your editorial comments are hand written, guys! Real journalists come on here and judge your entire readership, hundreds of thousands of people, based on the degree of professionalism you display.
Stop slouching! It's two O'clock in the afternoon, PUT PANTS ON!
Here's a java spellchecking applet. It certainly seems to work; I for one like to spell things correctly, I understand that other people don't and in a post I certainly have no business complaining, but I would like a little button, "spell check" next to Preview.
There are at least half a dozen spellchecking projects on sourceforge. I haven't found any Java applets, unfortunately.
Okay, I was just chatting with my teenage cousin on Kazaa, and that got me thinking. Her father is a lawyer (a defense attorney). She doesn't have Audio Galaxy, but I bet some lawyer, somewhere, has a kid who installed Audio Galaxy on their home machine; and I bet they sent work related web-based E-mail.
If I'm right and if this person can be found, surely you can subpoena Mindset to get logs of what they did with the information. IANAL myself, could you do anything else to them? The guy at www.cexx.org evidently spraypainted Blackstone's entire server pink - is that evidence that your legal communications could have been compromised? Is this stuff that cexx found utterly inadmissable?
Failing that, there are lawyers here. Set up a scheme to make Mindset/whoever they actually are defend themselves in court - if 100,000+ people really installed this software, they have to have something they're not remotely supposed to have.
Anyway - read the last bottom of the cexx story - it has the missing pieces of the story on HellPortal.
How old are you? Classic RPGs seem to me to be more fun because I was a kid when they were around.
I remember that Might and Magic I seemed really amazing. It seemed big, in terms of land area. It seemed real. I remember getting out of the first town in MMI and thinking - god damn, there's a world in here.
Well, clouds of Xeen (MM V?), even though it was a lot bigger, seemed smaller. With the newer Ultimas, they seem smaller because the outside world is on the same scale as the cities. This is a problem for me because it interferes with my suspension of disbelief. It makes the world less abstract, but also less real, because the whole Continent is only the size of Monte Carlo.
As far as non linear plots go, Wizardry 8 is pretty good. The plot could be more convuluted, but there are a fair number of sidequests and adequate NPCs - there aren't 200 NPCs, but each NPC responds realistically to unimportant questions they ought to know the answers to, which is important for suspension of disbelief. Might and Magic never had NPCs or a plot, and has continued in that vein pretty faithfully.
If you're talking about Final Fantasy - yeah, FF II had more / more interesting side quests than these latest four. FF X, while gorgeous, is a movie.
This is excellent science journalism. I'm glad to see the concerns of more skeptical scientists covered in such a balanced fashion. Most of the time, journalists, including those at the New Scientist, breeze past highly important caveats in favor of sensationalism - I'm sure we'll see this story repeated in Pro Life literature, for example, without qualifications. Kudos to Sylvia Westphal (author of the article.)
The fact that the claims being made appear on a patent application instead of in peer-reviewed research makes me extremely skeptical. Showing such a patent application to a member of the press - but not publishing - make me even more so. A great many people (I resist the temptation to post links) involved in Biotech make grandiose claims that they cannot really back up; the huge potential rewards have certainly led to compromises of scientific ethics in the past.
Just because a scientist is fishing for venture captialists does NOT mean that she is doing bad science; it does raise legitimate suspicion about her (Dr. Catherine Verfaillie, who did the work) research.
The "agelessness" and expression of unusual combinations of extracellular markers mentioned in the article are also features common to cancer cells. It is entirely possible that the process of extracting the bone marrow has merely selected out non-tumerogenic, precancerous cells. Such cells, which may very well substitute for stem cells anyway, but probably don't, might also spread through a mouse embryo into which they were injected.
Slashdot Mirror
The point I was making was that over 260 million years, carbon atoms would have experienced events sufficiently energetic to allow exchange with silicon over several FEET of distance. The events that cause chemical damage to the DNA are considerably less energetic, and they can occur anywhere in the specimen, not just on the surface where the specimen is exposed to rock. Any sample which is old enough to be a fossil is going to have meaningless DNA.
Over the course of 260 million years, all information content in the DNA would be lost; there might (if it were preserved in Amber, and not in something silicous) be things in the sample that looked like DNA, however, in a process very similar to what happens to old magnetic storage media (random bit flips eventually destroy the data) random chemical changes in the DNA would, absolutely and under any circumstance short of a vacuum at 2 Kelvin, have eroded or altered enough of the bases (after 260 million years, all of them) that recovering any information about the original sequence would be impossible.
Before anyone even starts with the Jurassic park stuff, it is not possible.
260 Million years is long enough for every carbon atom in a piece of bone several feet thick to exchange for silicon. Time(absolute) =~ 20,000 Million yrs.; we're talking about 1% of the age of the universe here, guys. It is a very, very long time.
So, even if you did recover something that looked like a biological molecule from a sample of this thing, all of the information content would have been destroyed long, long ago.
Scorpion growth factors, on the other hand, are well understood. In a strict sense, genetically modified scorpions are more like a modern scorpion that the one in the article. However, they are nearly as cool, they give you some idea of how such a creature may have lived, and you can feed fools to them when they've foiled your plans for the last time.
So, if anyone wants an eight foot long scorpion, I've started making them and I - Get away! No, no, I am your master! Aieeeee!
Anyway, this critter is weird but it pales in comparison to the real freaky shit in the burgess shale. If you want to know what body types evolution has abandoned (but might take up elsewhere in the galaxy?) check this out. It is a must read for anyone with an interest in writing 'hard' science fiction with aliens in it.
"Look, if he was dying, he wouldn't bother to carve 'aarrggh'. He'd just say it!" - King Arthur Pendragon
The devices I've seen billed as "Mini PCs" are a bit smaller than normal laptops, I'd say about 8" x 8" x 3" (it's late, don't jump on me if I'm off.)
People in "industry" buy them, with 286 chips, because they want to make embedded devices but don't want to deal with firmware. I have some friends who make scientific instruments, they use them for this purpose as well.
The only use I can think of for something with about 1 Ghz of power - and it's a pretty strange one - is as a control system for really outre field analytical devices, if I wanted to make them portable. I'm talking about a device with really a lot of intelligence that is basically built into a laptop casing, with room to spare to make it a bit tougher.
The big problem with this, of course, is that anyone who is thinking of carrying around such a device (parts alone upwards of 30 grand, depending on what exactly it is, plus value added from being custom made by multiple PhDs) can get a laptop. It would seem to be much simpler to control the device from the laptop, like we allready do for the few devices that work this way.
For one thing, there is little point in doing sophisticated analysis in the field if you don't have a moniter to view the results.
Jeez, lazy, aren't you.
Their "customer service team is anxious to hear from you." Call them up and ask them about boobies. You know you want to. Here's an insider look.
Anyway, breast implants are usually not filled with silicone. They're filled with saline solution or with soybean oil.
"this bug should not have been there" rants don't count as a solution
You're artificially restricting the sphere of possible solutions to things that might help, which is intellectually honest. Shame on you.
In ancient Sumeria, they used to execute architects when the buildings that they constructed collapsed. By the same token, we should kill some people.
If we've learned one thing from the 20th century, it is that big government is inefficient. Therefore, the killings should be handled by the private sector.
The proceedings against MS are criminal, in addition to civil. In a criminal proceeding, the judge is perfectly justified in issueing fatwas against MS programmers who write buggy code - this is a well established precept of Sharia.
Thus, I've proven that the free market will take care of MS on it's own, punishing it for buggy programming - through highly paid mercenary assassins, with EULAs to kill.
I want to test and see if anyone reads their EULAs. Distribute a piece of software with an EULA that says, about halfway through-
"By installing this software, you agree to take up arms in defense of (company name), march to the fastness of her foe, and slaughter her enemies. Please register the software so that we can give you your orders."
My guess is that they filed this suit to drum up publicity for their technology; if you think of every hit against their webpage as a targeted advertisement striking a potential techie customer (slashdotters, no less! Raise your hand if you've bought something stupid in the last year), well, it becomes very cost effective.
Not (Paranoid -> Not (After You))
Earlier, I said this doesn't raise any moral dilemmas - scratch that.
The abortion issue is a red herring - John & Jane (and Jill and Jacqueline) Mormon may get government sanction to adopt any aborted fetus they want in the state of Utah, by chucking them in one of these, but I doubt it.
However, I worry about extensive birth defects among babies birthed using this technique.
The evidence (search for string 'birth defects') is not as strong as I recall, but there is reason to believe that babies concieved by in vitro fertilisation - who are then transplanted into the womb of another woman - have higher birth-defect rates than other babies (this study was done in Australia, so maybe IFV agravates fetal alchohol syndrome.)
An artifical womb, which would, almost by definition, be a pretty imperfect copy the first time round, might have a hugely higher birth defect rate.
Be like me, enliven your sex life by discussing "flipper babies" instead of letting her go to sleep.
When the faculty are empowered - and I'm refering to the empowerment of cold, green, cash (for swimming in) - they can do as they please; which, when it comes to computers, is generally whatever their post docs, grad students and senior techs want (I'm a biologist.)
Often, at least here at Columbia, that means individual labs will just go out and buy a bunch of Intel machines on their own initiative, and put Linux on them. This has been going on for the past year or more, and Linux is starting to gain credence with the administration.
At a school where people don't have that kind of funding, individual groups don't have the resources to investigate, not just Linux but new avenues of procurement generally. As is too often the case, if you don't have the sugary wampum to evaluate the different vendors/solutions, you end up stuck with a bad deal.
Anyway, this is a problem that Linux people, especially those at academic instistutions, ought to be pursuing - I say this without bothering to look and see who's pursuing it and how, hoping that someone already familiar with the situation will respond by posting details.
Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that ill-will on the parts of some CS faculty towards some other CS faculty may be hampering the adoption of Linux by certain institutions.
You mean "deal with" in the mafioso sense, I presume.
I believe the presumption that the TV scumbags^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hindustry is working under is that they're going to shift over to digital TV (after delaying it for as long as possible since they get some kind of deal on spectrum until it comes about) and control redistribution with some kind of watermark.
My presumption is that they have achieved sublime mastery of the path of the Dodo. In the case of music, or movies, or comic books, you can say, redistrubition on the Internet is free advertising, and to a certain extent that is true, the MPAA and RIAA's profits may drop, but they're an organisation of producers (in the studio sense) as well as distributors; they actually make what is, for better or worse, our culture, which means society is their bitch. The individual people presently in control of movies and music can jockey for position in "the new order", and some of them may fall, but the music industry is not going anywhere.
The TV stations, and the networks, really, are not production groups. They subcontract production to TV studios with whom they are, in a large part, in an adversarial relationship. The TV studios, who actually make TV programs, are going to continue to find ways to make money - people want TV, and if the revenue streams of those companies are seriously threatened, society will accept whatever terms TV producers care to name. Another poster suggested streaming content with commercials from your web site - that is a good idea, but if the studio that actually makes Buffy is going to do that, why would they cut in Warner Brothers? Once they've done that, why broadcast the show at all?
The TV broadcasters, on the other hand, own nothing but a distribution monopoly. Should that monopoly pass away, they are in way more trouble than the people who actually make content.
One of the other posters said that TV isn't going anywhere in the next decade. He's right, but a decade, while it's forever is circuit design, is not very long in the lives of the TV moguls who see their family fortunes threatened.
The efforts by content distributors to have draconian controls installed in all personal electronics are going to get worse and worse. Our best hope is that they don't have the good sense to offer IBM and Panasonic the one thing that might make them go along with a plan to shift over to a DRM-enabled mandatory hardware standard - crass bribes of huge amounts of cash money.
I hate to be cynical, but it is not irrelevant.
To a University, which is a very conservative institution, most of the time, the risk of being sued, and losing, is simply untenable. Especially when you consider the staggering damages that might potentially be awarded - how much is something private "worth," if it has been released into the public domain at no profit for the party releasing it?
The same is true of venture capitalists. If I have a good idea, my ability to get backing is in a lot of danger if there are people waiting in the wings with lawsuits. Backing a biotech venture is pretty risky business anyway - adding in a 5% chance that, even if my method is teneable, it is going to be nuked, or the profits all siphoned off, in the courts, is not helpful; if you take into account the chance of potentially ruinous additional delay is more like one in three, well, it is a serious issue.
It is very naive to say that only the final decisions which courts reach are relevant.
All of what you say is, or ought to be, true.
However, Biotech companies are interpreting these patents in a very broad way, as you can see from the article.
The more sophisticated the biotech you're trying to develop is, the more burdensome these low level, frankly not-very-clever patents become.
By analogy in software, imagine how difficult it would have been to write Kazaa if quick sort, merge sort and the binary search were all patented. Supposing you needed all of them (and that bubble sort wouldn't do, but stay with me), you'd need to enter into negotations with each of three different parties who hold the patents, and get permission from each of them, before you could finish Kazaa. Now, Kazaa, even though it maps to the set of integers, is a legitimate achievement; the people who wrote it deserve protection of their coding investment. Merge Sort, while a cute idea, is NOT. There is a qualitative difference between the two.
The biotech patents that are being issued are, likewise, so basic, and generated on such an industrial scale - companies just churn them out as fast as they can - that they are begining to hamper innovation.
These biotech companies often won't enter into negotations about selling their intellectual property. They're flush with cash, by and large, and if they don't know what their property is worth, why would they sell it?
When you're trying to develop something really new and sophisticated (the biotech equivalent of a complete piece of software) you may need literally dozens of tiny processes which someone has patented. Even if none of these patents will hold up in court, the risk that not one but several parties could sue you to defend their interests - usually in different jurisdictions! - makes the legal risks of implementing such a procedure prohibitive, even if none of these patents would really stand up in court.
I have to add that Columbia university, where I am a graduate student, makes more money from patents (in particular one, rather basic, biotechnology patent) than any other University in the world, including the combined patent income of the Universities of California (my BS & BA are from UCSC). That money is what pays my stipend.
Anyone else getting the feeling that this "story" is in fact disinformation that probably originates with RIAA?
Okay, yeah, that was my first thought, as well. Given all of the flak that MS has gotten over security holes, it is the sort of thing that a dumbshit trying to commit PR sabotage would try and pull off. If you recall that the RIAA let it be known (I don't think the bill was actually submitted) that they want protection against damages they inflict while hacking our hard drives, we can conclude that the RIAA is unscrupulous enough to try something like this.
Now, firstly, all of that is pretty circumstancial. Smoke and mirrors, hearsay.
The reason I don't think it was the RIAA is that it wasn't slick enough. The RIAA may not be smart, but they are smooth. Glossy and convincingly packaged. This story reads like a communication between a reporter and his friend, a second rate hacker in a garage somewhere (Hey, I know both of these people!) Second rate hacker says "Hey, I think I've found a security hole in Morpheus! Probably a worm." Reporter says "Can I print that?" Hacker says "Uh.... don't put my name on it."
Given the tenor of the article, the (frankly obscure) place it shows up, and the lack of exact quotes - an RIAA "agent" would have given smooth reading soundbytes - I think that it's simply a screw up, with no malicious or deceptive intent. Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
Now, I know, it is still possible that the RIAA was clever enough to figure this out, and figure the way to make it look convincing. It is also possible that this is some sort of RIAA test to see how much attention this thing attracts, before setting off real hoaxes. That, however, is paranoia.
On the other hand, just because you're paranoid..... doesn't mean that this won't give the RIAA ideas.
This story seems a little short on details, and in Kazaa - which runs on the same proprietary engine and, I assume, would be vulnerable to the same worms as Morpheus (of course, closed source => I don't know) - you can just check the box next to your hard drive and share all of its contents. Are they certain that the people they've found didn't do that? That said, maybe Kazaa can't get the worm, if there is one, but when I turn sharing off, my friend can't get any files from my computer (just checked now, he's on the phone) at all; if you're worried, have a friend query your username and see what they can get.
My inner paranoid, who left the fetal position to read the RIAA thread, thinks this is a music industry plot. I want to say that that is totally preposterous, but after they asked for legislation to make it legal for them to hack our hard drives, I can't totally dispel the suspicion.
I honestly don't think that users are going to stop pirating music when those 3 things are allowed.
I agree with you, in spite of the hard numbers that I've seen (I can't find them at the moment, sorry). People who pirate mp3s say that they would like to give money to the artists, something like 60% of them (us).
However, while 44% of americans say they go to church regularly, about 20% actually do.
Why? Because they think people should go to church. Likewise, people who download mp3s, at least in a large part and I think in a majority, think that people who listen to music ought to support artists. That does NOT translate into action on their part; especially if you make it inconvenient, laborious or bothersome.
If it ever becomes really easy for me to give Eddie Vedder five bucks, I will; in fact, I think enough people, even though it would be a fraction of those who download his music, would do it for Eddie Vedder to live handomely, pay his recording fees, do publicity and support a small staff. However, even if it becomes really easy to do, it is never going to be anything like the racket that the RIAA is running now, and at least some industry people know it. The RIAA's only hope of survival is to destroy online music distribution entirely, which is what these insults.. I mean services, are a movement towards.
Like steering wheels, computer keyboards and exercise routines, engineering - this sort of engineering goes by various names that obscure its real nature - principles could be applied to make the video game controller less or non-harmful to use for seven hours a day. There may very well be a minor problem with the controllers themselves causing carpal tunnel, which should be studied, and if it is a problem, serious pressure needs to be brought to bear on the videogame industry to redesign the controllers, or to spend some of their massive profits to educate the public.
I seriously doubt that the vibration function has anything to do with it; it is more mild than what is experienced in those vibrating chairs, and they're safe. This BBC article is lazy, slipshod, sensationalist journalism reporting the ramblings of a lazy, incompetent, statistically ignorant medical doctor. They're proposing requiring warning labels (which I support generally, but they become meaningless if they're on everything) based on a single anecdote, a study with N = 1! It gives careful doctors with legimiate concerns and solid data a bad reputation when jerks like him are handed a soap box by the media.
Purcell likened it to a 20-year spring clean4ing. "It's time to get the garage cleaned out," he said.
;). Furthermore, if you call up his cv (really easy on google) you find that he's actually a defense industry journalist. We need congressional hearings to smoke these people out (YES I AM KIDDING.)
Describing the state of computing today as unstable and unreliable, he said Microsoft chairman Bill Gates "is really annoyed by the incredible pain we put everyone through in computing."
Nothing I could say could possibly be more critical of microsoft than this article.
There is no way that this is an accident. I think we've clearly identified Mr. William Jackson as a seditious, anti-microsoft, commie terrorist
The thing I can't figure out is if Mr. Jackson had to quote Richard Purcell out of context to make him sound like that much of a fool, or if Richard Purcell really was stupid enough to say that. I'm sure the parts in quotations are accurate - but I'm not sure the subtext of "everything MS has done for the past 20 years is garbage, we're sorry" was present prior to Mr. Williams' editing.
I'd love to see the original transcript of the interview. The one thing I haven't been able to dig up in the last five minutes is Mr. Williams' e-mail. (If I look I find the "Gospel Communication Network" staff e-mails.) If it can be found, timothy or somebody should send him an e-mail asking for the transcript.
the increasing vulnerability of our economic and technological systems to carefully aimed attacks....[is] paid far less attention.
We must not have been reading the same newspapers.
Nuclear power plants are certianly a technological system.
Virginia is looking into vulnerabilities in it's water treatment system.
The Net is so choked with "advice" (advertisements) on how to make the computer end of your business somehow sabotage tolerant that it tends to drown out other related topics; they do this on google which means people are reading them.
Now, these are not problems that suggest knee-jerk, civil-rights-violating "solutions" that get us, slashdotters, up in arms. So, they are not as well covered here.
Solving these problems requires 1) a lot of money, and 2) action (presumably forced by regulation) on the part of a lot of conservative, well moneyed, powerful people. So, the political cost in proposing a real solution, say, to hacking vulnerabilities in our financial system, is a lot higher than the political cost of raising the sentences for "computer terrorists."
So, yes, the real problems recieve less attention from politicians. I don't think that is true of journalists or of the general public.
Colleagues have already succeeded in cloning cells, causing them to differentiate into cartilege, and then, using an ear shaped scaffold, making an artificial ear; but only an artificial outer ear! It is basically a plastic surgery technique, the inner ear is too complicated to be made by this method.
coaxed the stem cells into becoming kidney cells, and then "grew" them on a kidney-shaped scaffold.
What he is saying is that he made a kidney-shaped lump of meat out of kidney cells. This is NOT the same as a kidney, even if it squirts out "urine".
Some of these kidney cells have a directional orientation which you cannot duplicate with a scaffold - without getting too technical, these cells are adjacent to two tubes, one tube which carries proto-urine and one tube which carries blood. The cell has to know which is which.
Even if the cells don't know which is which, and if the tubes are there, they might still produce something that looks kinda like urine, just because they allowed the contents of the artificial proto-urine tube to become isotonic (equal in content of water and salt) with the blood. I will say - if what these kidneys made was "good" urine, the people at Advanced Cell Technology would release it's contents in a second. There is no way that anyone could steal whatever trade secrets they have based on the quality of the urine their artificial kidneys produce.
Kudos again to the New Scientist for raising these concerns.
The FCC is the Federal Communications Commission. If you are involved in a dispute that is, in any way, commercial, they will not involve themselves. You have to talk to the FTC. This can be a bit of a bitch if you're small time and buying spectrum, or the like, and got ripped off, because it is the FCC who actually knows what is going on, but since it is a service dispute they won't get involved.
The FTC is the Federal Trade Commission. They are a very different animal - for one thing, they are a hugely more powerful institution. They are the people you have to talk to if you want a dispute (like, say, MS Passport is mysteriously billing you for services you didn't buy) resolved without involving the courts; even if you are going to go to court you generally have to talk to the FTC first.
It is, perhaps unfortunately, very difficult to get the FTC's attention. I assume that the state attorneys general know this. Also, major decisions at the FTC are made by political appointees; the Bush administration has been seen by many attorneys general as being soft on MS.
A distinction can be drawn between modifying the gene itself, and modifying an organism by cloning a gene into it.
I believe that JJ is objecting to the patent of the gene, itself, which is a natural thing and not an invention. I still maintain that such a patent is a lesser degree of absurdity than a patent on U-234 would be; but I agree with JJ that they should not be issued.
However, I do think you should be able to patent technologies that utilise specific natural genes - including the "invention" of cloning a particular gene for a particular purpose. Patents like that, which bother some people, don't bother me, and they basically amount to a patent on the gene, at least from a commercial standpoint.
You can also patent a gene where you have modified the gene itself, of course, although what you ought to get a patent on is the modification (which is clearly an invention.)
Patents which actually are on a naturally occuring gene, directly, rather than an application of the gene, are an insult.
Likewise, patenting all possible screens for a gene that (say) causes kidney disease is also an insult - it is like patenting the desired end of catching mice, or patenting the act of immobilising a mouse's tail, rather than a design for a mousetrap.
This may all seem like splitting hairs, but the overextended patents that are being granted are having - I am concinced of this from (thank you, Mr. Anonymous) anecdotal evidence even though I do not have any hard numbers - a chilling effect on innovaction in certain areas. As more and more of these bad, over-reaching patents are issued, the effect they have can be expected to get worse.
I have always said that Patents on genes was [sic] a bad disision [sic] ... scientists tried to patent Elements ...
... - Tribune
The logic on genes is different in a couple of respects; an individual gene is not a fundamental aspect of nature; genes are nearly infinite in number, as opposed to elements, which are finite; unlike elements, genes can be modified/designed. There are extensive and legimitate differences between a patent on a gene and a patent on an element.
I would say that patents on genes shouldn't be impossible, they should just be more difficult to get and more limited in scope. At the moment, I have considerable hearsay (that's the wrong term) evidence that patents on genes are stiffling innovation.
Before I start, I am a Structural Biologist and a Computational Biologist, I might also be called a Biochemist, Cell Biologist, Molecular Biologist, Biostatistician, Bioninformatician or Biophysicist. However, I am not a Geneticist.
The conclusion, reached by the Tribune, that profit motive is having a disastrous impact on genetics information sharing is reading too much into the article. I'd have to head into the university library to actually get a copy of the full text of the article, but most of what the article concludes is that geneticists feel worse about failure to share information than scientists in the other life sciences.
Geneticists were as likely as other life scientists to deny others' requests and to have their own requests denied. However, other life scientists were less likely to report that withholding had a negative impact on their own research as well as their field of research. - Jama article
Saying that geneticists feel worse about information sharing in their field - while certainly an interesting finding - is not sufficient to conclude that
The moneymaking potential of genetic discoveries is pushing an increasing number of scientists to withhold information about how they conducted research
Now, I will channel the spirit of Eric Cartman:
Bad Chicago Tribune! [Whack] That's my pot pie! [Whack] Gimme back my pie, you stupid paper! [Whack]
Assuming that it is counting which keys as well as how many - the little web page seems to indicate how many, and his friends seem to be having a race - I bet you could figure a way to tell good spellers from bad, using that information.
My guess would be that people who spell correctly would use uncommon letters with a certain relative frequency, but people who spell things wrong, frivelous [sic] for example, would use less uncommon letters and more common letters.
You'd need to do a lot of training - I'm sure that many poor spellers would "look like" people with good spelling and unusual word choice.
I don't want to be a spelling Nazi, I make occasional mistakes myself, but the editors of Slashdot need to start spellchecking their comments/articles. It isn't like any of your editorial comments are hand written, guys! Real journalists come on here and judge your entire readership, hundreds of thousands of people, based on the degree of professionalism you display.
Stop slouching! It's two O'clock in the afternoon, PUT PANTS ON!
Here's a java spellchecking applet. It certainly seems to work; I for one like to spell things correctly, I understand that other people don't and in a post I certainly have no business complaining, but I would like a little button, "spell check" next to Preview.
There are at least half a dozen spellchecking projects on sourceforge. I haven't found any Java applets, unfortunately.
And this time, it isn't "Let's get him!"
Okay, I was just chatting with my teenage cousin on Kazaa, and that got me thinking. Her father is a lawyer (a defense attorney). She doesn't have Audio Galaxy, but I bet some lawyer, somewhere, has a kid who installed Audio Galaxy on their home machine; and I bet they sent work related web-based E-mail.
If I'm right and if this person can be found, surely you can subpoena Mindset to get logs of what they did with the information. IANAL myself, could you do anything else to them? The guy at www.cexx.org evidently spraypainted Blackstone's entire server pink - is that evidence that your legal communications could have been compromised? Is this stuff that cexx found utterly inadmissable?
Failing that, there are lawyers here. Set up a scheme to make Mindset/whoever they actually are defend themselves in court - if 100,000+ people really installed this software, they have to have something they're not remotely supposed to have.
Anyway - read the last bottom of the cexx story - it has the missing pieces of the story on HellPortal.
How old are you? Classic RPGs seem to me to be more fun because I was a kid when they were around.
I remember that Might and Magic I seemed really amazing. It seemed big, in terms of land area. It seemed real. I remember getting out of the first town in MMI and thinking - god damn, there's a world in here.
Well, clouds of Xeen (MM V?), even though it was a lot bigger, seemed smaller. With the newer Ultimas, they seem smaller because the outside world is on the same scale as the cities. This is a problem for me because it interferes with my suspension of disbelief. It makes the world less abstract, but also less real, because the whole Continent is only the size of Monte Carlo.
As far as non linear plots go, Wizardry 8 is pretty good. The plot could be more convuluted, but there are a fair number of sidequests and adequate NPCs - there aren't 200 NPCs, but each NPC responds realistically to unimportant questions they ought to know the answers to, which is important for suspension of disbelief. Might and Magic never had NPCs or a plot, and has continued in that vein pretty faithfully.
If you're talking about Final Fantasy - yeah, FF II had more / more interesting side quests than these latest four. FF X, while gorgeous, is a movie.
This is excellent science journalism. I'm glad to see the concerns of more skeptical scientists covered in such a balanced fashion. Most of the time, journalists, including those at the New Scientist, breeze past highly important caveats in favor of sensationalism - I'm sure we'll see this story repeated in Pro Life literature, for example, without qualifications. Kudos to Sylvia Westphal (author of the article.)
The fact that the claims being made appear on a patent application instead of in peer-reviewed research makes me extremely skeptical. Showing such a patent application to a member of the press - but not publishing - make me even more so. A great many people (I resist the temptation to post links) involved in Biotech make grandiose claims that they cannot really back up; the huge potential rewards have certainly led to compromises of scientific ethics in the past.
Just because a scientist is fishing for venture captialists does NOT mean that she is doing bad science; it does raise legitimate suspicion about her (Dr. Catherine Verfaillie, who did the work) research.
The "agelessness" and expression of unusual combinations of extracellular markers mentioned in the article are also features common to cancer cells. It is entirely possible that the process of extracting the bone marrow has merely selected out non-tumerogenic, precancerous cells. Such cells, which may very well substitute for stem cells anyway, but probably don't, might also spread through a mouse embryo into which they were injected.