Cool medical things and Loathsome Lurkers

There were a couple of cool articles on MSN today, the first is about a man in Germany who had a new jaw grown and implanted successfully. It isn't known whether the bone-marrow stem cells injected into the titanium jaw-shaped form differentiated into the new bone, or if the cells were recruited from the tissue in his back where the form was implanted while it grew, but whatever the case it is fairly impressive that he has a jaw after nine years of not having one. I have to wonder if this isn't the first step towards someone getting their bones replaced with titanium reinforced ones, and then maybe some big claws built into the hands, super healing powers, a strange hair due, and a visit to the court house to change his name to Wolverine.
Apparently Bush is also nervous about this possibility, as he and his continue to block stem cell research in the US. Or maybe he is just really nice, and wants to give other countries the chance to become the next major centers for innovation in the medical arena? Of course, with Bush's new policies on foreign students, medicine might not be the only field he is offering up to other countries on a silver platter.
In contrast, the Bill Gates of medical & bio technology is emerging In California, and guess what, it is Bill Gates! Bill and a number of others are working to get a bond passed which would raise 3 billion to fund stem cell research in California (dodging Bush's fanatical ban of the research altogether, and causing much consternation in conservatives there and elsewhere). The list of supporters is long and recognizable. Many have medical conditions, or have children with them. Meanwhile, conservatives opposed to medical advance are bombing stem cell labs, apparently considering it their God given mission to kill those who try to regenerate organs and cure diabetes. I would like to express how incredibly messed up these people are, but I don't know if I could do it without a lot of expletives, and this IS a family blog after all.
Finally, on the home front, mere days after I opened a few ports on my firewall so that my little Linux server could go out and explore the vast wild land which is the Internet, some chumps have already decided to attack it. One in particular was persistent, trying to guess root's password about 200 times. Grabbing his IP from the logs, I looked him up on ARIN and much to my surprise it was the State of Utah Government! Initially I figured that it must have been that rat bastard Orin Hatch (may his sudo-religious soul forever burn in Hell Fire), but he just isn't techno savvy enough to do such a thing, and has no reason to know that I think some of his policies are the most loathsome ever oozed forth from a putrescent, cancerous sack of tissue such as he is. Instead I believe that the attacking system must have been broken into by some sort of Internet worm which was just blindly scanning the net looking for someone to try and spread itself to. Once it found me, it settled in to do it's dirty work. Probably the whole job was perpetrated by some no-account script kiddie who knows enough to download a rootkit and not much more. Mostly this is what one sees on the net. The true Dark Jedi Masters are generally smart enough to be focused on more sinister goals. My little servers and meager bandwidth would be of no interest to them (and a good thing too I might add, defending myself against a REAL attack could be trouble).