The fact that they can't determine why these phones are going up in smoke is scary. In a way it's understandable; the ones that do end up exploding burn up so there's no system logs or other evidence that could be checked to determine the cause.
The problem is obviously the charging circuit. If it were anything else, they could just put in better batteries, or ship better chargers. The recall happened because the problem is on board the phone itself.
Newer phones still have the problem, so we know it's a design problem, rather than a component sourcing problem (like the counterfeit capacitors problem). In addition, Samsung manufactures their own phones, and their assembly lines operate differently, compared to Chinese assembly lines at Foxconn: it's very easy for them to localize a problem in the manufacturing process, whereas Foxconn goes out of their way to hide it by making bad employees into nameless cogs.
So basically, they have a design problem in the charging circuit, probably in the cell leveling portion of the charger, in the same way that the "Hoverboard" clones that keep starting on fire have a known bad charging circuit that overcharges some lithium cells in the larger battery, while other lithium cells get too little charge, on the charging circuit keeps drawing amps for all of the cells.
Then when the overcharged cells are discharged, they pretty much "Flame On!", and someone does a fair imitation of The Human Torch(tm).
This stuff isn't rocket science, it's basically third year in a U.S. community college EE and analog circuit design.
Yes, there's an issue with software updates.... vendors need to be more responsible about that.
Vendors are. Cell carriers aren't. Without a new shiny, how are they supposed to lock you into a new contract for another 18 months, until the next new shiny comes out?
Everything is predicated on locking a customer into your business, in order to reduce customer acquisition costs. It costs a heck of a lot more to acquire a customer than it does to lock them into a contract so you can retain them.
Without this aspect of the business model, both your cell phone costs and your service costs go up. The phone costs go up because they are no longer subsidized, and the service costs go up because they can't amortize the customer acquisition across an average of 5-7 years, and instead have to worry about the customer leaving.
The entire telephone company service model has always been about charging based on circuit switching points, and charging for long distance. Now that everyone is using cell phones, they can't do that any more, and have moved to packet switched networks. But in order to maintain their profit margin, they've had to push the costs off to other areas.
In case you care, most of the costs come from federally mandated rural service. If the telephone companies didn't have to provide service so that when someone in a rural area was having a heart attack, they didn't just conveniently die, and not be in a rural area any more, they could vastly reduce their infrastructure costs.
Most of the rest of the world (certainly Europe) doesn't seem to realize that the U.S. has about 180,000,000 people who do *not* live within 50 miles of a coastline. Unlike the U.K., where *everyone* lives within 50 miles of a coastline. The U.S. is *big*.
Standardizing parts would help a lot. In this case, for example, it's a lot of screens and such that have nothing to do with the problem that SHOULD be going into the spare parts bins for repairs.
Is this for the one guy who kept hist Galaxy 7?
You know, so he can replace the parts every 5 -7 days as it catches on fire?
The point is that Facebook is willing to pay to get people without any access service to the point that they have at least some access.
Bitching about that access not leading to all possible places on the Internet is like bitching about the food bank not guaranteeing that the food they give you is Halal food.
The hardware is "existing cellular infrastructure and telephone handsets to be provided by the carriers".
Still not seeing the government paying for anything.
I agree that them discussing it at all is time politicians could be better spending doing things like honoring their campaign promises (e.g. closing GITMO), but realistically: if you pay a politician for access, you get access.
Get the Obama/Democratic White House behind this idea.
Given the editorializing that Facebook has been accused of on the news feeds, favoring Democratic candidates, one would think both of those would *already* be behind it, since they're already reaping the benefit, and this would be a way to amplify it further.
(1) There was a specific Indian Internet startup that has about 5% of the Jobs Board market, and they were about to be shut out of the market that Facebook was about to open up by providing Jobs Board access to pretty much everyone -- only not their Jobs Board. Rather than pay the entry fee, and join the subsidy group of web sites, this startup decided to spend the money they would have spent on that lobbying against the idea, and buying as many politicians as they could.
(2) The jobs market in India is highly competitive, and this would have opened up the "haves" to competition from the "have nots", in terms of people applying for the same jobs that they felt were rightfully theirs. In other words: it was egalitarian, and based on whether you had sufficient merit to compete in the jobs marketplace, rather than being based on your social standing (i.e. read as: can afford to pay for Internet access in order to apply for the jobs in question).
In the first case, it was potentially raising a barrier to new startups who could not afford the buy-in; the buy-in was subsequently restructured as a "percentage of net revenue", so as to be non-discriminatory against smaller companies (but by then, the trigger had been pulled on the "Net Neutrality" gun).
In the second case, however, it was simply the people with Internet access being anti-competition from those "lower caste" persons who currently don't have the access, but who would potentially be winning jobs away from "higher caste" persons.
---
I can understand an insistence on a percentage of net profits being able to "buy access", even if that amounts to nothing more than $1/year, so as to not create a barrier to entry, but I really can't fathom building a wall between the people who can afford Internet access and people who canb't afford Internet access, and then forcing the people who can't afford Internet access to pay for its construction.
(and if that hit a little close to home for some people -- good: it was intended to).
Everyone -- absolutely everyone -- who is posting on Slashdot against the idea already has Internet access!
"I've got mine, and screw everyone else, even if getting a cut-down version would be astronomically better than what they currently have!"
The "I've got mine" attitude works a whole lot more for a limited commodity, not so well as adding another node to a network. Plus, given that this wireless Facebook access wouldn't allow for access to Slashdot, it's not hypocritical to the Slashdot crowd.
Actually, it is.
The people who already pay for Internet access are the ones bitching about other people not paying, if they don't care about web sites too poor to help pay for the subsidy to allow access to their sites.
There's no question that it's anticompetitive against poor sites -- but given that the target market aren't seeing any sites right now, them continuing to not see your site because your company is unwilling to help pay for subsidy access really could mean three different things:
1. (the one you want it to mean) People don't get the full Internet for free, and so they should get absolutely no Internet instead, because it's somehow better for them that, if they can't look at my site using the subsidy service, they should simply have no Internet access whatsoever.
2. (the one I think it actually means) Your company is a cheap ass company that wants any free offering to include it without having to pay their fair share of the access subsidy so they get whitelisted with the other altruistic companies.
3. (the "dog in the manger" version) I have Internet access I pay for, and if some sites are free to other people, they should be free to me, too, but I have some cheapskate sites that I like to go to, so they shouldn't have to pay, but I shouldn't have to pay either.
And if you don't think Internet access is a limited quantity, I invite you to spend a summer in La Verkin, Utah -- Population 4,060, and not worth U.S. West's time to put in high speed network access for anyone.
This is against Facebook abusing and manipulating their power to promote specific websites and potentially strangling their rivals using government money to do so.
That's just the thing, though, isn't it?
This is about "zero-rating", meaning that there is no government money involved.
I know that it's fashionable to not ready the articles before commenting, but had you read the article, this will be paid for by Facebook, the carriers (as a loss-leader to get people to buy into paid data plans instead), and by the major web sites that would be accessible without code (including, but not limited to, Facebook).
If they were spending tax dollars on it, that'd be one thing, but talking to the White House to get your political pull lined up to allow you to offer something at your own cost, instead of having the public pay for it? That's not spending tax dollars.
That's fine, if it's only at "crossing points"... it'll only end up tracking tourists, since New Yorkers are about half as bad as San Franciscans, when it comes to just walking anywhere they feel like it, rather than in crosswalks.
Everyone -- absolutely everyone -- who is posting on Slashdot against the idea already has Internet access!
"I've got mine, and screw everyone else, even if getting a cut-down version would be astronomically better than what they currently have!"
One has to wonder if the people against the plan really have their own interests in mind, and want to have free, unrestricted Internet for themselves, rather than paying for it, and so are dragging out these "But it won't help the poor people get jobs, if they can only access 'Indeed' or 'Monster.com', instead of my asinine 0.001% of the market jobs web site instead, just because I'm unwilling to help pay to subsidize access for the poor people in the first place!" arguments as a strawman...
If anyone who doesn't have Internet access disagrees with this assessment of what's going on, please speak up now!
Or MUCH more likely, the police behaved themselves better because they were being watched.
MUCH more likely that false complaints wouldn't go anywhere, because if the interaction was recorded, it's harder to jam up a cop that pisses you off by complaining they did something they didn't do.
Cops pretty much know that they are being filmed most of the time, since even 8 year olds who can't legally enter into service contracts with cell companies are carrying around cell phones capable of recording video. In any urban area, if there are people around and a police interaction going on: it's filmed.
This car, and dozens of cars with drivers everyday in Pittsburgh. I was forced onto the sidewalk about a week ago by a driver driven car that did this. (not the same street)
Were you a pedestrian at the time?
You know that if you were a pedestrian, you're *supposed to* use the sidewalk instead of the street, right? New York is *not* San Francisco, where people who walk have priority over cars, and people on bicycles have priority over everyone else.
VirtnetX pretty much sues everyone. They are patent trolls. They lost against Cisco, which means we can sill use VPNs.
Apple will undoubtedly appeal, and cite Alice Corp vs CLS Bank, which has about a 78% win track record for the defendant, when cited as part of a patent case. Either way: the next level of appeal takes it out of East Texas, also known as "Patent Troll Heaven".
East Texas has only a *reputation* for awarding favorable verdicts to plaintiffs alleging infringement; in reality it is not the most favorable district.
Yes, but Apple was successful in fighting the change of venue to Somalia, which is where VirnetX wanted to have it tried... so they had to settle for East Texas.
It's the opinion of David G. Luettgen in a journal article, which claims computer programs are also not copyrightable. It also claims in its conclusion that electrical circuits are a creative expression, while computer programs are not.
It's too bad no one thought of that 40 years ago. We could have had an unmanned exploration mission on Mars back in 1976 or so.
Oh. Wait. Viking landed on Mars in 1976, didn't it.
40 F'ing years ago. Are we maybe kind of done with the exploratory crap, and ready to send people yet?
Let's see... we went from the first autogyro to landing on the moon in 40 years. Now it looks like we've moved from an unmanned landing on Mars... to Yet Another Unmanned Landing On Mars(tm) over the last 40 years.
When a cell divides, the methyl groups are only on the original strand; the new complimentary strand doesn't have any. The methylation signal has to be actively transcribed from one strand to another; an enzyme runs up the DNA feeling for methylated cytosine residues. When it finds some, it starts methylating any cytosine residues that might be nearby on the opposite strand, to make sure the troublesome regions all stay commented out. That's why it's heritable.
The methylation inactivation is heritable. The issue, in this case, was erroneous activation or switching of cells to modify protein production.
I suspect that the mechanism involved (they don't say) in the repair of the genes which end up going back to normal is related to the production of O6-methyl-transferase via the MGMT complex sites on the long arm of c21 -- the same thing that results in chemo-resistance to cancers, such as pancreatic cancer or glioblastoma, when combined with the appropriate mutation of the p53 gene on c17.
I think as long as it doesn't involve a long term mutation of a cancer related gene, such that it effect the germ cells, it's not a problem. Since you tend to come pre-packed with all the germ cells you are ever going to have in your lifetime, then the issue will be smoking by pregnant women, and all other damage that results in disease will only be self-inflicted diseases, rather than heritable.
Which still means they've failed to answer the question of whether or not it's heritable, because they've failed to discuss whether or not it impacts germ cells (arguably unlikely, but it'd be nice to have an answer, particularly when making decisions on how and when to regulate smoking, or minimally, smoking in public).
We already prohibit general use of a number of medical interventions based on transplanting porcine cells into humans.
For example, it's possible to exploit the immune privilege of the brain in order to transplant fetal pig brain cells into humans to treat conditions such as Parkinson's, Huntington's and islet cells into the pancreas of people with Type I diabetes.
The big risk is Porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV -- yes, it's actually called that), being transmitted, and becoming part of the human genome. Thus, people who have received these xenografts are prohibited from sexual reproduction post-graft (although it's possible to save germ cells prior, to permit in vitro fertilization techniques).
It's not Hitlerian, or in any way related to eugenics to prevent introduction of DNA errors or endogenous viruses into the general genome in a heritable way.
They don't answer the only question we care about.
Heritability.
If it doesn't damage your kids genes...and by extension, pollute the human genome...then I don't care if you are dumb enough to damage your own health.
Unless you are a close relative, or smoke around me, it's no skin off my nose, if you want to commit suicide by cigarette or a Kevorkian death machine.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that they can't determine why these phones are going up in smoke is scary. In a way it's understandable; the ones that do end up exploding burn up so there's no system logs or other evidence that could be checked to determine the cause.
The problem is obviously the charging circuit. If it were anything else, they could just put in better batteries, or ship better chargers. The recall happened because the problem is on board the phone itself.
Newer phones still have the problem, so we know it's a design problem, rather than a component sourcing problem (like the counterfeit capacitors problem). In addition, Samsung manufactures their own phones, and their assembly lines operate differently, compared to Chinese assembly lines at Foxconn: it's very easy for them to localize a problem in the manufacturing process, whereas Foxconn goes out of their way to hide it by making bad employees into nameless cogs.
So basically, they have a design problem in the charging circuit, probably in the cell leveling portion of the charger, in the same way that the "Hoverboard" clones that keep starting on fire have a known bad charging circuit that overcharges some lithium cells in the larger battery, while other lithium cells get too little charge, on the charging circuit keeps drawing amps for all of the cells.
Then when the overcharged cells are discharged, they pretty much "Flame On!", and someone does a fair imitation of The Human Torch(tm).
This stuff isn't rocket science, it's basically third year in a U.S. community college EE and analog circuit design.
Yes, there's an issue with software updates .... vendors need to be more responsible about that.
Vendors are. Cell carriers aren't. Without a new shiny, how are they supposed to lock you into a new contract for another 18 months, until the next new shiny comes out?
Everything is predicated on locking a customer into your business, in order to reduce customer acquisition costs. It costs a heck of a lot more to acquire a customer than it does to lock them into a contract so you can retain them.
Without this aspect of the business model, both your cell phone costs and your service costs go up. The phone costs go up because they are no longer subsidized, and the service costs go up because they can't amortize the customer acquisition across an average of 5-7 years, and instead have to worry about the customer leaving.
The entire telephone company service model has always been about charging based on circuit switching points, and charging for long distance. Now that everyone is using cell phones, they can't do that any more, and have moved to packet switched networks. But in order to maintain their profit margin, they've had to push the costs off to other areas.
In case you care, most of the costs come from federally mandated rural service. If the telephone companies didn't have to provide service so that when someone in a rural area was having a heart attack, they didn't just conveniently die, and not be in a rural area any more, they could vastly reduce their infrastructure costs.
Most of the rest of the world (certainly Europe) doesn't seem to realize that the U.S. has about 180,000,000 people who do *not* live within 50 miles of a coastline. Unlike the U.K., where *everyone* lives within 50 miles of a coastline. The U.S. is *big*.
Standardizing parts would help a lot. In this case, for example, it's a lot of screens and such that have nothing to do with the problem that SHOULD be going into the spare parts bins for repairs.
Is this for the one guy who kept hist Galaxy 7?
You know, so he can replace the parts every 5 -7 days as it catches on fire?
You can "dude" and "bro" me all you want.
The point is that Facebook is willing to pay to get people without any access service to the point that they have at least some access .
Bitching about that access not leading to all possible places on the Internet is like bitching about the food bank not guaranteeing that the food they give you is Halal food.
The hardware is "existing cellular infrastructure and telephone handsets to be provided by the carriers".
Still not seeing the government paying for anything.
I agree that them discussing it at all is time politicians could be better spending doing things like honoring their campaign promises (e.g. closing GITMO), but realistically: if you pay a politician for access, you get access.
Get the Obama/Democratic White House behind this idea.
Given the editorializing that Facebook has been accused of on the news feeds, favoring Democratic candidates, one would think both of those would *already* be behind it, since they're already reaping the benefit, and this would be a way to amplify it further.
Just saying...
Because it breaks Net Neutrality.
I give India credit for being smart.
Actually, India said "no" for two large reasons:
(1) There was a specific Indian Internet startup that has about 5% of the Jobs Board market, and they were about to be shut out of the market that Facebook was about to open up by providing Jobs Board access to pretty much everyone -- only not their Jobs Board. Rather than pay the entry fee, and join the subsidy group of web sites, this startup decided to spend the money they would have spent on that lobbying against the idea, and buying as many politicians as they could.
(2) The jobs market in India is highly competitive, and this would have opened up the "haves" to competition from the "have nots", in terms of people applying for the same jobs that they felt were rightfully theirs. In other words: it was egalitarian, and based on whether you had sufficient merit to compete in the jobs marketplace, rather than being based on your social standing (i.e. read as: can afford to pay for Internet access in order to apply for the jobs in question).
In the first case, it was potentially raising a barrier to new startups who could not afford the buy-in; the buy-in was subsequently restructured as a "percentage of net revenue", so as to be non-discriminatory against smaller companies (but by then, the trigger had been pulled on the "Net Neutrality" gun).
In the second case, however, it was simply the people with Internet access being anti-competition from those "lower caste" persons who currently don't have the access, but who would potentially be winning jobs away from "higher caste" persons.
---
I can understand an insistence on a percentage of net profits being able to "buy access", even if that amounts to nothing more than $1/year, so as to not create a barrier to entry, but I really can't fathom building a wall between the people who can afford Internet access and people who canb't afford Internet access, and then forcing the people who can't afford Internet access to pay for its construction.
(and if that hit a little close to home for some people -- good: it was intended to).
There is not a single altruistic fiber in this move. It's an attempt to corner the market, on the expense of people who already have nothing.
This would be the lucrative market of "advertising things people can't afford to people who have no money to buy them in the first place"?
I'm thinking that the pre-dot.bomb Internet is calling, and they say they want their business model back.
Everyone -- absolutely everyone -- who is posting on Slashdot against the idea already has Internet access!
"I've got mine, and screw everyone else, even if getting a cut-down version would be astronomically better than what they currently have!"
The "I've got mine" attitude works a whole lot more for a limited commodity, not so well as adding another node to a network. Plus, given that this wireless Facebook access wouldn't allow for access to Slashdot, it's not hypocritical to the Slashdot crowd.
Actually, it is.
The people who already pay for Internet access are the ones bitching about other people not paying, if they don't care about web sites too poor to help pay for the subsidy to allow access to their sites.
There's no question that it's anticompetitive against poor sites -- but given that the target market aren't seeing any sites right now, them continuing to not see your site because your company is unwilling to help pay for subsidy access really could mean three different things:
1. (the one you want it to mean) People don't get the full Internet for free, and so they should get absolutely no Internet instead, because it's somehow better for them that, if they can't look at my site using the subsidy service, they should simply have no Internet access whatsoever.
2. (the one I think it actually means) Your company is a cheap ass company that wants any free offering to include it without having to pay their fair share of the access subsidy so they get whitelisted with the other altruistic companies.
3. (the "dog in the manger" version) I have Internet access I pay for, and if some sites are free to other people, they should be free to me, too, but I have some cheapskate sites that I like to go to, so they shouldn't have to pay, but I shouldn't have to pay either.
And if you don't think Internet access is a limited quantity, I invite you to spend a summer in La Verkin, Utah -- Population 4,060, and not worth U.S. West's time to put in high speed network access for anyone.
This is against Facebook abusing and manipulating their power to promote specific websites and potentially strangling their rivals using government money to do so.
That's just the thing, though, isn't it?
This is about "zero-rating", meaning that there is no government money involved.
I know that it's fashionable to not ready the articles before commenting, but had you read the article, this will be paid for by Facebook, the carriers (as a loss-leader to get people to buy into paid data plans instead), and by the major web sites that would be accessible without code (including, but not limited to, Facebook).
If they were spending tax dollars on it, that'd be one thing, but talking to the White House to get your political pull lined up to allow you to offer something at your own cost, instead of having the public pay for it? That's not spending tax dollars.
That's fine, if it's only at "crossing points"... it'll only end up tracking tourists, since New Yorkers are about half as bad as San Franciscans, when it comes to just walking anywhere they feel like it, rather than in crosswalks.
Does anyone else find this absolutely hilarious?
Everyone -- absolutely everyone -- who is posting on Slashdot against the idea already has Internet access!
"I've got mine, and screw everyone else, even if getting a cut-down version would be astronomically better than what they currently have!"
One has to wonder if the people against the plan really have their own interests in mind, and want to have free, unrestricted Internet for themselves, rather than paying for it, and so are dragging out these "But it won't help the poor people get jobs, if they can only access 'Indeed' or 'Monster.com', instead of my asinine 0.001% of the market jobs web site instead, just because I'm unwilling to help pay to subsidize access for the poor people in the first place!" arguments as a strawman...
If anyone who doesn't have Internet access disagrees with this assessment of what's going on, please speak up now!
You cannot leave the role of education and exploration to a private interest group.
You mean a private interest group like the NEA?
Your fun at partys
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Oh. Sorry. I thought we were speaking Tamarian.
Or MUCH more likely, the police behaved themselves better because they were being watched.
MUCH more likely that false complaints wouldn't go anywhere, because if the interaction was recorded, it's harder to jam up a cop that pisses you off by complaining they did something they didn't do.
Cops pretty much know that they are being filmed most of the time, since even 8 year olds who can't legally enter into service contracts with cell companies are carrying around cell phones capable of recording video. In any urban area, if there are people around and a police interaction going on: it's filmed.
Why not? The officer on an "off" week is simply performing the habituated alternate behavior.
Unless they also received nicotine as a result of wearing the camera, I'm going to vote for successful operant conditioning.
Otherwise, no one would swear in the vicinity of a visible "swear jar".
This car, and dozens of cars with drivers everyday in Pittsburgh. I was forced onto the sidewalk about a week ago by a driver driven car that did this. (not the same street)
Were you a pedestrian at the time?
You know that if you were a pedestrian, you're *supposed to* use the sidewalk instead of the street, right? New York is *not* San Francisco, where people who walk have priority over cars, and people on bicycles have priority over everyone else.
At least they don't drive in the Lexus Lanes when they are only supposed to be used by Lexus owners and carpools....
VirtnetX pretty much sues everyone. They are patent trolls. They lost against Cisco, which means we can sill use VPNs.
Apple will undoubtedly appeal, and cite Alice Corp vs CLS Bank, which has about a 78% win track record for the defendant, when cited as part of a patent case. Either way: the next level of appeal takes it out of East Texas, also known as "Patent Troll Heaven".
East Texas has only a *reputation* for awarding favorable verdicts to plaintiffs alleging infringement; in reality it is not the most favorable district.
Yes, but Apple was successful in fighting the change of venue to Somalia, which is where VirnetX wanted to have it tried... so they had to settle for East Texas.
http://www.tiplj.org/wp-conten...
Ref section 99.
That's not an authoritative citation.
It's the opinion of David G. Luettgen in a journal article, which claims computer programs are also not copyrightable. It also claims in its conclusion that electrical circuits are a creative expression, while computer programs are not.
The guy is kind of talking out his arse.
"an unmanned exploration mission by 2018"
It's too bad no one thought of that 40 years ago. We could have had an unmanned exploration mission on Mars back in 1976 or so.
Oh. Wait. Viking landed on Mars in 1976, didn't it.
40 F'ing years ago. Are we maybe kind of done with the exploratory crap, and ready to send people yet?
Let's see... we went from the first autogyro to landing on the moon in 40 years. Now it looks like we've moved from an unmanned landing on Mars ... to Yet Another Unmanned Landing On Mars(tm) over the last 40 years.
Good job, dudes.
When a cell divides, the methyl groups are only on the original strand; the new complimentary strand doesn't have any. The methylation signal has to be actively transcribed from one strand to another; an enzyme runs up the DNA feeling for methylated cytosine residues. When it finds some, it starts methylating any cytosine residues that might be nearby on the opposite strand, to make sure the troublesome regions all stay commented out. That's why it's heritable.
The methylation inactivation is heritable. The issue, in this case, was erroneous activation or switching of cells to modify protein production.
I suspect that the mechanism involved (they don't say) in the repair of the genes which end up going back to normal is related to the production of O6-methyl-transferase via the MGMT complex sites on the long arm of c21 -- the same thing that results in chemo-resistance to cancers, such as pancreatic cancer or glioblastoma, when combined with the appropriate mutation of the p53 gene on c17.
I think as long as it doesn't involve a long term mutation of a cancer related gene, such that it effect the germ cells, it's not a problem. Since you tend to come pre-packed with all the germ cells you are ever going to have in your lifetime, then the issue will be smoking by pregnant women, and all other damage that results in disease will only be self-inflicted diseases, rather than heritable.
Which still means they've failed to answer the question of whether or not it's heritable, because they've failed to discuss whether or not it impacts germ cells (arguably unlikely, but it'd be nice to have an answer, particularly when making decisions on how and when to regulate smoking, or minimally, smoking in public).
"pollute the human genome" Nice one, Hitler!
We already prohibit general use of a number of medical interventions based on transplanting porcine cells into humans.
For example, it's possible to exploit the immune privilege of the brain in order to transplant fetal pig brain cells into humans to treat conditions such as Parkinson's, Huntington's and islet cells into the pancreas of people with Type I diabetes.
The big risk is Porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV -- yes, it's actually called that), being transmitted, and becoming part of the human genome. Thus, people who have received these xenografts are prohibited from sexual reproduction post-graft (although it's possible to save germ cells prior, to permit in vitro fertilization techniques).
See also:
Porcine xenografts in Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease patients: preliminary results.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
So yes, numb-nuts: "pollute the human genome".
It's not Hitlerian, or in any way related to eugenics to prevent introduction of DNA errors or endogenous viruses into the general genome in a heritable way.
They don't answer the only question we care about.
Heritability.
If it doesn't damage your kids genes ...and by extension, pollute the human genome ...then I don't care if you are dumb enough to damage your own health.
Unless you are a close relative, or smoke around me, it's no skin off my nose, if you want to commit suicide by cigarette or a Kevorkian death machine.