Slashdot Mirror
Don't Stymie Nanotech
Anonymous Coward writes "A new paper released by the Pacific Research Institute says that nanotechnology holds benefits for society if not blocked by misguided regulation or outright bans. Already, some prominent individuals (like Bill Joy) have questioned the rationale of continuing nanotech research - PRI's paper explains that nanotech has more benefits than drawbacks, and that bans and heavy regulation are not in society's best interests"
coz they're getting smashed in the cricket...
Nano tech will create black hole in the earth's core and turn the universe into a huge cow
g to the oatse
c to the izzex
fo shizzle my nizzle jared...
Holy shit, this is apparently true. Mod me down if you must, but be careful with your laptop!
---
November 22 2002
Doctors are warning that laptop computers may inflict a burn even through clothed skin, after the bizarre case of a Swedish scientist who scorched his penis and testicles while writing a report in his armchair.
The unnamed 50-year-old father of two had balanced the computer on his lap while he wrote the report at home, taking about an hour to do it, according to a letter published in the next issue of the British medical weekly The Lancet.
The following day, he started to develop painful blisters on his foreskin and scrotum, which became infected but eventually cleared up without the need for antibiotics.
Laptop manuals usually advise users not to use the computer while its base is resting directly on exposed skin, as heat can build up if the device is left on for a long time.
In this case, however, the patient had been wearing trousers and underpants.
The tale "should be taken as a serious warning against use of a laptop computer, in a literal sense," said the letter's author, Claes-Goran Ostenson of the department of molecular medicine at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
SHORTEST BOOKS EVER WRITTEN
"A Guide To Arab Democracies"
"A Hiker's Guide To The Ho Chi Minh Trail"
"Advanced Linux User's Guide"
"Blacks I Met While Yachting"
"Career Opportunities for Liberal Arts Majors"
"Excellence In The CFL"
"Fast And Efficient Windows Applications"
"How To Be A Good Sport", by Tonya Harding
"How To Win The Super Bowl", by Jim Kelly
"Keebler Elves That Touch Themselves"
"My Life As A Woman", by Martina Navratilova
"The Engineer's Guide to Fashion"
"Young, Single Males Speak Out Against Masturbation"
"How to be Normal" and "How to be Polite" both by RMS
"Easy to use Linux"
A Canadian telephone book
"My Social Life" by ESR
"Correct Spelling and Grammar in English" by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda
"Business Ethics" by William Gates III (with foreword by Ken Lay)
"Heterosexuality among the Slashdot crew"
"Truths I have told" by Al Gore
"How to Speak Clearly and Correctly" by George W. Bush
"How Canadians Stand Up for Themselves"
"How to Get a Date with a Woman" by your local LUG
"How to Tell the Truth" by William J. Clinton
"The Names of Women Interested in Linux Geeks"
"Successful Business Plans Using Linux"
"What I Wouldn't Do For Money" by Jon Katz
"How to Write Software People Would Want to Buy" by Linus Torvalds
"Addresses of Houses in Canada that aren't Igloos"
"GPL Software that Normal People Want to Use"
LONGEST BOOKS EVER WRITTEN
"Loneliness, Buttplugs, Linux and You" by ESR
"Why your name should have 'GNU/' in Front of It" by RMS
"Being Rude to Foriegners" by the French Government
"How to Sexually Abuse Penguins" by Linus Torvalds
"Homosexuality among the Slashdot crew"
"I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary. You'll see, it'll happen to you."
-- Grandpa Simpson
B.G.A.T.(Billy Goats Against Trolls) is proud to announce that SexyKellyOsbourne has made our most wanted list. Normally it is pretty hard for us to prove our case against such people. But Ms. Osbourne has taken special care to ensure that the world knows she is a troll.
Example #1 Right from her own journal.
As much as B.G.A.T. would like to take credit for this, it does all come right from the trolls mouth!That one wasn't enough to convince you. How about This one? And then there is this one. She has also taken a moment to tell her something about herself.
A quick glance at her posting History tells it all. Here is one of my favorites. Just have a look at the people on her FOE LIST. She has to go! So please take this time to spend just one mod point to keep this genital wart on society out of sight.
MOD HER DOWN AS A TROLL!!!! Not because I said so, but remeber she is a self confesed troll.
To bad this is exactly the kind of crap she lives for. I wonder how many people have to totally despise her before she just goes away? Or will this make her stay for good?
I love Mary Jane!
I'm open to debate this, but I really don't see VB.NET holding it's
.NET incarnation, has no clear advantage when
.NET path to jump on. Once .NET has been around a while, it .NET languages and it makes no
.NET (couldn't help but notice the .NET .NET platform. I see VB.NET
own against C# for very long (very long being defined in terms of
release versions over the next x amount of years). Allow me to
explain:
What Microsoft is now calling "unmanaged" Visual Basic has been very
successful because of two things: It's ease of use for beginners, and
it's speed of use for professionals. If we break this into detail, we
could compare VB project development to VC++ project development. The
VB IDE is much more user-friendly and even with large projects the
number of source files to manage is small when compared to VC++.
The syntax and debugging approach for VB (v1-6) is also designed to be
a lot more intuitive, hiding many of the details.
If you ask a developer competent in VB and VC++ to list some of the
limitations of VB, you would likely get: No support for
multi-threading, lack of inheritance, lack of pointers, etc...
So with the current release of VB there is a clear list of absent
features that seperate it from a lower-level language such as VC++,
likewise VC++ doesn't offer VB's ease of use, which has crippled it's
ability for RAD.
When comparing VB.NET to C#, it's more like comparing a Gala apple to
a Fuji apple, instead of the Apples and Oranges comparison we get with
VB and VC++. We are dealing with two languages that share an almost
identical set of features, that derive almost all their functionality
from the same set of class libraries.
From a RAD perspective, the only small advantage VB.NET has over C# is
VB's current user base. This is however in large an illusion
considering the amount of training it's going to take to get a VB
developer familure with VB.NET
From a design (IDE) perspective VB.NET, C# and all the languages that
will run inside Visual Studio.NET are on equal ground. So aside from
the three of four pieces of functionality that you can achieve only in
VB.NET, VB in it's
compared to C#.
C# in fact has the advantage. It's syntax is more universal in nature
and can be likened to: C++, Java, ECMAScript, JScript, (countless
other languages derived from the C syntax). C# has all the ease of
VB.NET (neither of which are as "easy" as VB6) and C# syntax actually
takes up less space than VB.NET in most cases.
I believe Microsoft when they say that there are no current plans to
abandon VB. Doing so, or making any such announcement at this point
would be a horrible mistake on their part. However, when you compare
VB.NET and C# side-by-side, the only reason why C# and VB.NET need to
both exist is so that current: Java, C++ and VB developers can find a
familiar
will be survival of the fittest for all
sense for industry to adapt their developers to multiple languages
that all provide the same feature set. The best of these language will
make the cut, the others won't. Microsoft won't have to kill VB,
developers will naturally move away from it.
Because of the learning curve, Microsoft appears concerned about
existing VB developers moving to
overflow of VB.NET material in TechEd 2001). Understand, Microsoft
realizes that their ability to migrate existing VB developers to
is a vital key to the success of the
existing to fill this gap. When this need no longer exist, the VB
language will loose all advantage and will likely desolve away.
At least 12 people have been killed in the Nigerian city of Kaduna after protests against next month's Miss World beauty competition descended into bloody violence.
Many more are also believed to have died, after thousands of Muslim youths rampaged through the suburbs of the city, erecting barricades of burning tyres, setting fire to buildings, and attacking churches.
The authorities in the northern city have declared a curfew with immediate effect.
Protests started after the newspaper ThisDay published an article which said that the Prophet Mohammed would probably have chosen to marry one of the contestants if he had witnessed the beauty pageant, which Nigeria is hosting next month.
Kaduna is one of Nigeria's most volatile cities, and has been largely segregated into Christian and Muslim areas since clashes two years ago, in which more than 2,000 people died.
Text message
On Wednesday hundreds of people chanting "Allahu Akbar" (God is great) attacked the Kaduna office of the Lagos-based newspaper, which has retracted the article and published two separate apologies.
Civil rights activist Shehu Sani told the French news agency, AFP that the city had descended into "pandemonium" on Thursday, with the streets littered with burning tyres.
"Schools and public offices are shut. Business is paralysed, everybody is staying at home and the security forces are trying to avoid contact with the demonstrators," he said.
The BBC's Yusuf Sarki Muhammad says that local mosques had been calling for action against the paper and said that some people were first alerted to the article by text messages being sent to their mobile phones.
Death by stoning
The government has issued a statement, appealing for calm and assuring Muslims that those responsible for the ThisDay article would be brought to book, for exceeding "the bounds of responsible journalism."
Witnesses told Reuters news agency that the rioters have vowed to attack ThisDay offices all over the north, where Sharia law has been introduced.
Miss World, Agbani Darego
Nigeria is hosting the Miss World contests after Miss Nigeria won last year
The Miss World pageant is taking place over several weeks in Nigeria, but only in the southern, largely Christian and Animist, part of the country.
Muslim groups say the contest is un-Islamic and are also upset that it began during the holy month of Ramadan.
The contest had also been threatened by a large-scale boycott by beauty queens protesting against a Sharia court's sentence of death by stoning against Amina Lawal, a woman convicted of adultery.
The Nigerian Government has moved to calm fears by promising it will not allow any Nigerian to be stoned to death and about 90 Miss World contestants have arrived in Nigeria, ahead of the final contest in the capital, Abuja, on 7 December.