The more interesting part of this story is how they got the cells to proliferate and detect (with high specificity) cancer cells. The HIV portion of the story is just sensationalism.

No where in the article was it reported that HIV was injected into a patient. They used the retroviral nature of HIV to insert genes into white blood cells in vitro and then injected these modified cells back into the patient.

Yeah they can, for an example see Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association where the California State Legislature passed AB 1179 in 2005 and was subsequently deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court last month.

I have my B.A in biology and my M.S. in microbiology. I see a lot of people here saying biology majors don't understand enough math, but from my perspective I can't figure out where it would fit into the curriculum. For my bachelor's I had a semester of calculus and a semester of statistics. What many people don't realize is a biology major is typically 1 or 2 courses away from a minor in chemistry, I personally had 5 semesters of chemistry. A couple of semesters of physics are typically required also. This is all before you even start to add in general studies courses and then core course work which covers everything from ecology, evolution, microbiology, cell biology, molecular biology, anatomy and physiology, and biochemistry just to name a few. From my experience many biologists are weak in microbiology and ecology because those course are often skipped. How can you argue for more math when the breadth of the biological disciplines aren't even covered.

Actually, If I remember correctly... Didn't GeoHot just "jailbreak" the system and then turn it over and let the community to its own devices? I think he even advocated against using his methods to enable piracy.

These bacteria were cyanobacteria from the genus Gloeocapsa, which to my knowledge are non-spore forming.

Chrono Trigger is a really bad example of the point you are trying to make. Today it does seem like a rudimentary game, but when it was released in 1995 it was anything but. The game was released by the biggest RPG maker in the world at the time and was made by a "Dream Team" of developers, including Akira Toriyama (creator of Dragonball Z). The graphics, gameplay, music, and multiple endings all went way over the top of what was expected in a game. This game was designed, ground up, to be a blockbuster...and it was.

For the love of Pete, its Halobacterium salinarum. Can we please use latin binomials properly.