My understanding of this (non scientist view) is that they found stem cells grown in isolation of other cells tended to become tumors. But when placed in the presence of similar cells or with cells of the areas of the body where they needed to grow, they were more likely to behave as hoped and turned into the needed cells. Maybe some kind of cellular chemical signature guidance to the stem cell of what to do. But what a gamble, you have to put the stem cells right into the affected area where if things go wrong, it would be very hard to fix. This is why I thought they were working towards using stem cells to grow new teeth since they could implant them and then if necessary pull them out if things went wrong. Teeth are apparently similar in many ways to more sophisticated internal organs, so a lot would be learned by perfecting it. Plus, it would totally be marketable if you could grow people brand new perfect teeth.

"For the fundamental truth self-determination of the cosmos, for dark is the suede that mows like a harvest. "

I haven't seen anyone comment on the distraction of GPS systems. Of course, they also get you where you need to go quicker so reduce your time on the road looking for your destination. But still listening to the thing and trying to follow its instructions can be at least as distracting as having a conversation with a passenger or using a hands-free phone.
I mean there is no question people do all kinds of stupid things and I can hardly believe people using phones with one hand while they try to park their car or back it out of a tight spot. But I think to claim hands-free is more of a distraction than a conversation with a passenger is a stretch. At a minimum, it would depend on the circumstances. Someone having a simple conversation on the phone with both hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road could certainly be less distracting than a screaming argument with a passenger.

As an aside, my favorite distracted driving story is about a friend of a friend going to work and seeing the woman behind him doing her makeup in the rearview mirror in stop and go traffic. A few minutes later the guy stops the car in traffic and the lady rear ends him. He looks back and sees her pulling her lipstick out of one of her nostrils.

Tower Madness is a good Tower Defense game. Moxie 1 and 2 word game (although Moxie 1 is now on Facebook, too). Peggle is good, but I think I actually prefer it on the old click-wheel ipod. Star Wars Trench Run for the total Star Wars geek (raises hand). Some of the high end racing games are good too, but I kind of suck at them.

I've gotten a ton of games free from the Free App A Day site and FreeAppCalendar and others like it. I just check them once a day and see if they have anything good. Also got HarborMaster and SpyMouse (my kid likes that one) free from Starbucks. Not sure if they are worth full price, but I play them from time to time.

Tower Madness I got for free originally, but happily have bought in game extras since I have gotten way more than a dollar worth of fun out of the game.

I think you are on to something there. As a unit of measure, each 30 minutes of wasted time should be referred to as a "Kardashian". The same length of time as their show.

I don't know about buying it in a heartbeat. But I totally agree that this is a brilliant way to take a stupid copyright dispute that hurts both parties with legal bills and turns it into a great marketing opportunity for both companies. If I were on either side of this, I would hype it like crazy. Trash talking press conferences with nose to nose photo ops... the works. Is Don King still around? Gamers will eat this stuff up. Hard to say if it would translate directly into game sales, but they say any kind of publicity is good publicity. And gaming companies settling disputes with gaming contests just feels so right.

I'm not disagreeing with you. But why are we limiting ourselves to thinking just about cars? A cost effective electric generator for homes and businesses would be a game changer calling into question whether we even need an electrical grid. As I understand it, homes are often terribly energy inefficient and a big percentage of electrical power is lost in transport through the grid. Aren't there some big benefits there, too? Particularly if the generators needed weren't quite compact enough for current vehicular engine compartments. Either have one per home, or even just replace transfer stations with larger thorium generators and reduce the distance the power has to travel.

What does your heart tell you?

I hope so. Yes, I guess...

Ugh, now I need a shower.

I guess the only good thing about it for him, is that this is the first I have heard of doing such a serious crime with clearly inconsequential gain just for the jail health care. The public and even the authorities might actually have some sympathy with him for his plight. So, even if he gets essentially thrown "out" of jail, he might be able to make some money selling his story to the media. Of course that won't work for the next guy who does this and doesn't even make the news. That guy is just screwed.

I guess you can fool some of the Papal some of the time...

Well, our words are made up of individual letters that by themselves have no particular meaning. But you have to learn them first before you can read words. I always thought the culture in that episode just had another level to learn before most language made sense. Perhaps if he was marooned with one of their children, they could have chatted away easily.

But yeah it was just a show.

I didn't know the strike had that effect on the Dead Zone and 4400. Dead Zone was drifting away from interesting to me at the end. But 4400 that was a great show. Each season had a powerful concept arc that really drove the story forward, I thought. When you think of trying to do an X files type show or the like, it is challenging to come up with big story arcs that you can do from year to year but still add something to the episodic shows in the middle. You can go full on vision like Lost where it is mostly mapped out ahead of time. Or like 4400, each season had a big arc that also drove the shows in between. The first season you are just trying to find out what happened to the 4400 people. The season finale basically tells you. The next season drives on from there exploring the impact of the 4400. They had good arcs about the reaction of the government, the organizing of the 4400. Different factions, key characters growing in power and importance. Major changes to the status quo of who has powers and what that means. Right up to the last episode.

I miss that show.

Yes, I was also thinking you could use the length of time as an added decision point. When a particular choice is being made the user would have to wait a second or two before entering it. Anything before that wouldn't work. You have the user choose how the time sensitive entry would work beforehand and give very few clues on the screen when it is happening.

For example, I could set things up so that when I'm entering my password, the last two keys have to be separated from the others by a timespan of between two seconds and four. It wouldn't help if someone was watching you do it, but it would help obfuscate how smudges are read after the fact to guess a password. Nothing about the smudges should indicate when they were pressed. I guess if you were doing some heat signature analysis for the fading heat of the finger press, you might be able to glean that. But that seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through and you would need full access to the device shortly after its use to even do that.

My own story is somewhat more embarrassing. I think it is safe to say, there are plenty of things about networking that I don't know. So, when I had to decide how to setup my own WiFi, I referred to a copy of 2600 I had that detailed instructions on hacking WiFi networks. Whenever the article said that getting around some security feature was out of the scope of the article, I made sure I turned that feature on. I'm sure a really good hacker could get in anyway, but at least he/she would need something better as a reference than the article I had read.

That part worked fine. But this year we had a big snowstorm (East Coast). The power went out for a while one night. When it came back, I discovered during shoveling breaks that the WiFi was down. So, one day I want to check my email and I search for local WiFi networks. I found an unprotected one. Unencrypted and still with the default SSID and everything. Just sad. So, I logged in, checked my email. Read the headlines on CNN.com and logged out. Smugly, I thought I should figure out which neighbor it is, so I could warn them.

The next day, I login to the router to fix my WiFi and I can't get in. My admin password doesn't work. The password was reset to the default password. It turns out the unprotected router was mine! It must have gotten reset during the power outage and I guess subsequent power surge.

Crap. I replied to the wrong post. The above post was meant as a reply to Jedidiah's "technological liberty" post.