What's with all these Microsoft old guys wearing sweaters?

Seriously. Bill Gates had a sweater. Ballmer has some ratty-ass sweater. Is that supposed to be endearing? If so, to whom -- other old guys on the golf course?

Appearances count, and as long as Ballmer is the pitchman for the stuff -- overweight and dressed in some 10 year old cartigan -- not only will I not take Microsoft seriously, but I don't want to have anything to *do* with Microsoft anymore.

The best part of SF was playing with friends, and the Wii is the console to have to play with friends at home. I guess online play will come to the rescue but it is not the same. Sad.

I'd also whack the marketing genius who came up with the "Plays for Sure" label upside the head.

In this case, the marketing gaff is as bad as the DRM itself. (And it also makes one wonder how much DRM and marketing go hand-in-hand. Microsoft seems to have an issue lately with marketing snafus. They've always had issues, yes -- but the idea of "Plays For Sure" and "Vista-capable" makes me realize that marketing [in general] is even more bullshit than I'd always suspected.)

I work for the company (CRi) that produced the polarized light imaging system (Oosight) that this guy credits for much of this new cloning success. In case anyone's interested the product website is here. and has links to movies of actual monkey eggs being manipulated and having their original DNA removed.

The basic principle is that the highly-ordered molecules on which the chromosomes are mounted are birefringent (they change the polarization-state of light), so if you know what the original polarization state was and if you can measure the state afterwards, then you can detect those molecules, even though they are transparent. As the BBC article says, this means you don't need to use toxic dyes to find them (which is obviously a bad idea, if you want the egg to actually survive the process).