Actually, replacement nipples could be a huge step forward for women who are facing a mastectomy. Their choices are 1) mastectomy and reconstruction with no nipple, 2) mastectomy and reconstruction with a tattoo where the nipple was, or 3) a "nipple-sparing" mastectomy, which is a much more difficult procedure, carries risks because some tissue gets left behind, isn't always appropriate/possible for women with small breasts, and sometimes fails.
I was dating somebody a few years ago who was diagnosed with breast cancer, and went to most of her surgical consults. (She's fine now; thanks for asking...) Preserving the nipple was a big deal for her, even though there was a good chance that she'd never get sensation back. she went with the nipple sparing option, despite the potential downsides, and was happy with the outcome. (Her summary: "It doesn't look perfect, but it doesn't look deformed, either")
I suspect that if 3D printing of a new nipple was possible for her - and mitigated some of the risks, she might have gone with that.
This was the premise of the first naval battle in Clancy's Red Storm Rising. TFA is neither original nor insightful. Even armchair strategists understand the concept of attrition.
I've got a friend with brain cancer who was enrolled in one of the current virus trials - one which has shown great promise in animal studies. He ended up leaving the trial after a month or so, with tumor regrowth and tremendous swelling around the tumor site, causing all sorts of problems with speech, reading, and sight. He has surgery scheduled for tomorrow, after that, hopefully another trial.
Not to be a downbuzz, but it's a long road before this kind of therapy is anything more than an experimental crapshoot.
If I had to guess, despite the summary's "irony of taking out a newspaper ad to protect the Web" being "lost on no one", that the irony will be lost on the RIAA, the MPAA, Righthaven, LLC, and most members of Congress.
"If you're putting more than 50 words on a slide, you've fucked up."
50? Seriously? Unless you're showing a screenshot, listing some code, or pulling a quote, the magic number is seven. In general, if you have more than seven words on a slide, you've fucked up.
More than that, and the presenter is usually just reading the Powerpoint deck. And in that case, why are you wasting my time, when you could have just emailed it to me in the first place?
So, the Liberty will be able to put about 20,000 kg into LEO for about $9,000 per Kg. The Falcon 9 can put just over half that (10K kg or so) into LEO for somewhere between $5,400 - $6,000 per kg, depending on the load factor. (Numbers pulled from the SpaceX web site.)
Of course, there are other costs besides the raw launch cost (insurance, etc.), but it will be interesting to see how these two vehicles compete. For things like ISS resupply missions, it may make sense to just shoot the Falcon twice.
Once the Falcon 9 heavy gets into the mix (32,000 kg to LEO for $95M), ATK & Astrium will need to sharpen their pencils a bit. That'll be one and a half times the payload for half the cost or so.
Price wars for space launch capacity? I can't wait to watch!
With all due respect to your FPS experience, obviously, you've never fired a M1911 or one of it's variants. Personally, I find it much easier to hit what I'm aiming at (yeah, there's more recoil, but the energy profile is more easily controllable) , and there a lot of people in the field who will tell you that the stopping power of the 9mm Parabellum cartridge is simply inferior to the.45 ACP.
The 1911 is a sweet weapon. It's reliable, and is a lot of fun to shoot.
You might be surprised to know that the 1911 is still preferred by everyone from Delta Force to the FBI's HRT to Marine Recon.
I'd opine that the M1911 took so long to replace was that it did the job it was designed to do because it was the best at what it did - NATO politics notwithstanding. I'll take a 1911 (throated and ramped, to be sure) over a M9 any day of the week.
Really? You prefer a weapon that's "sorta in the vicinity of the target with a pretty large explosive charge" (mortar) , as opposed to "small munition with a CEP of one meter with a laser-measured target"?
Time to brush up on the old critical thinking skills.
I'm glad you pointed this out. 700 fps is less than the speed of sound, so the weapon is not just smart, it's suppressible. (For all you non-shooters, that means you can put a silencer on it.) Prolly not enough to cancel the report upon firing, but enough that you can design the weapon so it doesn't give away your position.
Just a hunch, but I'm guessing that they actually tested to see if it really works. Otherwise, and given that this thing is now in the field, there would already be a pissed-off bunch of Army riflemen complaining that it doesn't work. And in the age of bloggers, wikileaks, etc., we'd probably be hearing about it already.
If I'm facing a squad armed with one of these, my bet is to not be on the other side of the wall.
I have no problem with the CONCEPT of consolidation, but Virginia's IT outsourcing/consolidation project to Northrup Grumman happened on Kundra's watch. It is an unmitigated disaster.
Years into it, there's not even a complete inventory of the systems that NG is supposed to be managing for the Commonwealth, and at least as of a few months ago, NG couldn't even produce an invoice for the Commonwealth to pay that had more than six or eight line items on it.
I sat through a special meeting of the House Committee on Science and Technology on the issue a few months ago, and the legislature is NOT happy about the situation. Privately, you will hear from them words like "gross negligence" to "I'm convinced it's corruption". The Delegates who engineered the legislation enabling the IT outsourcing are especially pissed.
No disrespect to Kundra, but I don't think he's the right guy to oversee it.
would you rather use a one-liner that requires a 3-line comment, or a 10-liner that requires no comments?
Easy. 10 lines, no comments. After writing a couple of million lines of code, the more code I write, the more I unwind it. Somewhere along the line, adolescent programmers got the idea that jamming all your logic into as few unreadable lines as possible is the fastest way to manliness. Way, way wrong.
Modern compilers and interpreters do a pretty good job nowadays. Source code bytes are near free. If you have to skull out dense code 6 months after you've written it, you're doing something wrong.
(OK, Lisp and APL are special cases, but really, when's the last time you wrote Lisp or APL, other than for fun?)
Yes, I know the chances of surviving a 24 kilovolt shock are pretty low, but I'm willing to risk it.
Nope. The chances of surviving a 24 kilovolt shock are actually pretty high, if the amperage is low enough. That little spark between your finger and a doorknob on a cold, dry day can be millions of volts.
"Also, S.139 would grant an exemption for data that 'was rendered indecipherable through the use of best practices or methods, such as redaction, access controls, or other such mechanisms, that are widely accepted as an effective industry practice, or an effective industry standard.'"
I think that the whole purpose of this is to cover things like storing passwords, etc., as hashed data. That's something I tried to get into Virginia's data breach law (and will probably give it a shot again this year), but try explaining the concept of "cryptographic hashes" to legislators who are mostly lawyers. Three guys on the subcommittee got it (engineers and tech guys), but it was WAY over everybody else's heads.
And it's not just the legislators. the LexisNexis lobbyist went ballistic over the idea until she talked to somebody in her IT department, because she didn't understand what was going on.
I understand what this language is supposed to do, but it's just poorly crafted.
Doesn't this guy have a sixth amendment right to a speedy trial?
Besides (and Google may have led me the wrong CA statute) but it look like the penalty for the remaining charge could be as little as a $5,000 fine. It also seems to have an out:
"Subdivision (c) does not apply to punish any acts which are committed by a person within the scope of his or her lawful employment. For purposes of this section, a person acts within the scope of his or her employment when he or she performs acts which are reasonably necessary to the performance of his or her work assignment."
I'd been looking for an adapter to use an old IBM keyboard with my Mac. I'd never liked "squishy" keyboards, or ones with short key travel, and Apple keyboards seem to get squishier and shorter as time goes by. Then I found the Unicomp. My fingers are happy now.
The only downside is that you need to do a little prefs-setting and key swapping to put the option and command keys in the right place, but that's no big deal.
The basic premise of the parent post, sucking the right genes out of the fungus and splicing them into something a little more productive, is right in the frickin' article and bears repeating:
"Its ultimate value may reside in the genes/enzymes that control hydrocarbon production, and our paper is a necessary first step that may lead to development programmes to make this a commercial venture."
...might be "How To Kill an Open Source Project With A Crappy Web Site".
I took a look at OpenSophie.org, and there's nary a specific description of what the project is, no screenshot graphics, and the only documentation and examples seem to be embedded in downloadable.zip files.
I'm not saying that the project's good, or bad, or bogus, but from the website, there's nothing that makes me want to litter my hard drive with zips from an unknown, untrusted source, just to find out more.
...isn't primarily with the law, it's with the Nevada definition of "encryption". Writing definitions of such things for legislation is a more difficult problem than you might think. (I helped draft Virginia's definition of encryption, and what we ended up with ain't perfect.) But in this case, Nevada's definition just plain sucks.
One of the challenges of writing legislation is that you really can't refer to specific technologies, otherwise you end up having to update the law every time the technology is broken.
Also, if you rely on a punch list of approved technologies, you effectively block out alternatives. ("But your honor, I used Blowfish because it's more secure than Triple-DES." "Sorry, son, Blowfish isn't on the list I see here. Guilty!")
Unfortunately, this is a case of "Not a Bad Idea, Piss-poor Implementation". There's a lot for Nevada to fix here.
A ton of commercial (and in-house) applications have had their UIs prototyped with Macromedia (now Adobe) Director. Especially with a third-party "xtra" called OSControl (which gives you access to OS-specific, well, controls like menus, tabs, etc.), Director makes building a UI prototype quick and easy.
Director's a little long in the tooth for real desktop application development. Still, I'm not sure that there's another tool that lets you build "quick and dirty prototypes" (with enough functionality to actually test with users) as rapidly as Director.
Avoid the latest version (Director 11) like the plague, though. It's an abomination.
BTW, as a process issue, a "look and feel prototype" is always one of the earliest milestones in our development cycle. The client has to sign off on the interface, and write a check for a progress payment, before we proceed into actual code-slinging. Saves a boat load of headaches to do it this way.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, replacement nipples could be a huge step forward for women who are facing a mastectomy. Their choices are 1) mastectomy and reconstruction with no nipple, 2) mastectomy and reconstruction with a tattoo where the nipple was, or 3) a "nipple-sparing" mastectomy, which is a much more difficult procedure, carries risks because some tissue gets left behind, isn't always appropriate/possible for women with small breasts, and sometimes fails.
I was dating somebody a few years ago who was diagnosed with breast cancer, and went to most of her surgical consults. (She's fine now; thanks for asking...) Preserving the nipple was a big deal for her, even though there was a good chance that she'd never get sensation back. she went with the nipple sparing option, despite the potential downsides, and was happy with the outcome. (Her summary: "It doesn't look perfect, but it doesn't look deformed, either")
I suspect that if 3D printing of a new nipple was possible for her - and mitigated some of the risks, she might have gone with that.
This was the premise of the first naval battle in Clancy's Red Storm Rising. TFA is neither original nor insightful. Even armchair strategists understand the concept of attrition.
...there's still tons of work to do.
I've got a friend with brain cancer who was enrolled in one of the current virus trials - one which has shown great promise in animal studies. He ended up leaving the trial after a month or so, with tumor regrowth and tremendous swelling around the tumor site, causing all sorts of problems with speech, reading, and sight. He has surgery scheduled for tomorrow, after that, hopefully another trial.
Not to be a downbuzz, but it's a long road before this kind of therapy is anything more than an experimental crapshoot.
Political patronage in Chicago?
I'm shocked!
If I had to guess, despite the summary's "irony of taking out a newspaper ad to protect the Web" being "lost on no one", that the irony will be lost on the RIAA, the MPAA, Righthaven, LLC, and most members of Congress.
...because the latest in Virginia's IT outsourcing saga is that the State Police are having severe access problems to servers hosted by NG.
Outsourcing to these guys has been a disaster for the Commonwealth. And it happened on Vivek Kundra's watch.
+ 1.
Well played, sir, well played.
50? Seriously? Unless you're showing a screenshot, listing some code, or pulling a quote, the magic number is seven. In general, if you have more than seven words on a slide, you've fucked up.
More than that, and the presenter is usually just reading the Powerpoint deck. And in that case, why are you wasting my time, when you could have just emailed it to me in the first place?
So, the Liberty will be able to put about 20,000 kg into LEO for about $9,000 per Kg. The Falcon 9 can put just over half that (10K kg or so) into LEO for somewhere between $5,400 - $6,000 per kg, depending on the load factor. (Numbers pulled from the SpaceX web site.)
Of course, there are other costs besides the raw launch cost (insurance, etc.), but it will be interesting to see how these two vehicles compete. For things like ISS resupply missions, it may make sense to just shoot the Falcon twice.
Once the Falcon 9 heavy gets into the mix (32,000 kg to LEO for $95M), ATK & Astrium will need to sharpen their pencils a bit. That'll be one and a half times the payload for half the cost or so.
Price wars for space launch capacity? I can't wait to watch!
With all due respect to your FPS experience, obviously, you've never fired a M1911 or one of it's variants. Personally, I find it much easier to hit what I'm aiming at (yeah, there's more recoil, but the energy profile is more easily controllable) , and there a lot of people in the field who will tell you that the stopping power of the 9mm Parabellum cartridge is simply inferior to the .45 ACP.
The 1911 is a sweet weapon. It's reliable, and is a lot of fun to shoot.
You might be surprised to know that the 1911 is still preferred by everyone from Delta Force to the FBI's HRT to Marine Recon.
I'd opine that the M1911 took so long to replace was that it did the job it was designed to do because it was the best at what it did - NATO politics notwithstanding. I'll take a 1911 (throated and ramped, to be sure) over a M9 any day of the week.
Really? You prefer a weapon that's "sorta in the vicinity of the target with a pretty large explosive charge" (mortar) , as opposed to "small munition with a CEP of one meter with a laser-measured target"?
Time to brush up on the old critical thinking skills.
I'm glad you pointed this out. 700 fps is less than the speed of sound, so the weapon is not just smart, it's suppressible. (For all you non-shooters, that means you can put a silencer on it.) Prolly not enough to cancel the report upon firing, but enough that you can design the weapon so it doesn't give away your position.
I want one now.
p.s. Bitching link. Lotta serious info. Thanks.
Just a hunch, but I'm guessing that they actually tested to see if it really works. Otherwise, and given that this thing is now in the field, there would already be a pissed-off bunch of Army riflemen complaining that it doesn't work. And in the age of bloggers, wikileaks, etc., we'd probably be hearing about it already.
If I'm facing a squad armed with one of these, my bet is to not be on the other side of the wall.
Sperm whales have a carbon footprint? What? From the Hummers they're driving, or all the coal-burning power plants they've built?
I know this is Idle on Slashdot, but man, that is the dumbest headline I've seen in a while.
I have no problem with the CONCEPT of consolidation, but Virginia's IT outsourcing/consolidation project to Northrup Grumman happened on Kundra's watch. It is an unmitigated disaster.
Years into it, there's not even a complete inventory of the systems that NG is supposed to be managing for the Commonwealth, and at least as of a few months ago, NG couldn't even produce an invoice for the Commonwealth to pay that had more than six or eight line items on it.
I sat through a special meeting of the House Committee on Science and Technology on the issue a few months ago, and the legislature is NOT happy about the situation. Privately, you will hear from them words like "gross negligence" to "I'm convinced it's corruption". The Delegates who engineered the legislation enabling the IT outsourcing are especially pissed.
No disrespect to Kundra, but I don't think he's the right guy to oversee it.
Easy. 10 lines, no comments. After writing a couple of million lines of code, the more code I write, the more I unwind it. Somewhere along the line, adolescent programmers got the idea that jamming all your logic into as few unreadable lines as possible is the fastest way to manliness. Way, way wrong.
Modern compilers and interpreters do a pretty good job nowadays. Source code bytes are near free. If you have to skull out dense code 6 months after you've written it, you're doing something wrong.
(OK, Lisp and APL are special cases, but really, when's the last time you wrote Lisp or APL, other than for fun?)
Nope. The chances of surviving a 24 kilovolt shock are actually pretty high, if the amperage is low enough. That little spark between your finger and a doorknob on a cold, dry day can be millions of volts.
It's current that kills, not voltage.
"Also, S.139 would grant an exemption for data that 'was rendered indecipherable through the use of best practices or methods, such as redaction, access controls, or other such mechanisms, that are widely accepted as an effective industry practice, or an effective industry standard.'"
I think that the whole purpose of this is to cover things like storing passwords, etc., as hashed data. That's something I tried to get into Virginia's data breach law (and will probably give it a shot again this year), but try explaining the concept of "cryptographic hashes" to legislators who are mostly lawyers. Three guys on the subcommittee got it (engineers and tech guys), but it was WAY over everybody else's heads.
And it's not just the legislators. the LexisNexis lobbyist went ballistic over the idea until she talked to somebody in her IT department, because she didn't understand what was going on.
I understand what this language is supposed to do, but it's just poorly crafted.
Doesn't this guy have a sixth amendment right to a speedy trial?
Besides (and Google may have led me the wrong CA statute) but it look like the penalty for the remaining charge could be as little as a $5,000 fine. It also seems to have an out:
"Subdivision (c) does not apply to punish any acts which are committed by a person within the scope of his or her lawful employment. For purposes of this section, a person acts within the scope of his or her employment when he or she performs acts which are reasonably necessary to the performance of his or her work assignment."
I'd been looking for an adapter to use an old IBM keyboard with my Mac. I'd never liked "squishy" keyboards, or ones with short key travel, and Apple keyboards seem to get squishier and shorter as time goes by. Then I found the Unicomp. My fingers are happy now.
The only downside is that you need to do a little prefs-setting and key swapping to put the option and command keys in the right place, but that's no big deal.
Get one. It's 70 bucks well spent.
Please mod parent UP!
The basic premise of the parent post, sucking the right genes out of the fungus and splicing them into something a little more productive, is right in the frickin' article and bears repeating:
Troll my ass...
...might be "How To Kill an Open Source Project With A Crappy Web Site".
I took a look at OpenSophie.org, and there's nary a specific description of what the project is, no screenshot graphics, and the only documentation and examples seem to be embedded in downloadable .zip files.
I'm not saying that the project's good, or bad, or bogus, but from the website, there's nothing that makes me want to litter my hard drive with zips from an unknown, untrusted source, just to find out more.
...isn't primarily with the law, it's with the Nevada definition of "encryption". Writing definitions of such things for legislation is a more difficult problem than you might think. (I helped draft Virginia's definition of encryption, and what we ended up with ain't perfect.) But in this case, Nevada's definition just plain sucks.
One of the challenges of writing legislation is that you really can't refer to specific technologies, otherwise you end up having to update the law every time the technology is broken.
Also, if you rely on a punch list of approved technologies, you effectively block out alternatives. ("But your honor, I used Blowfish because it's more secure than Triple-DES." "Sorry, son, Blowfish isn't on the list I see here. Guilty!")
Unfortunately, this is a case of "Not a Bad Idea, Piss-poor Implementation". There's a lot for Nevada to fix here.
A ton of commercial (and in-house) applications have had their UIs prototyped with Macromedia (now Adobe) Director. Especially with a third-party "xtra" called OSControl (which gives you access to OS-specific, well, controls like menus, tabs, etc.), Director makes building a UI prototype quick and easy.
Director's a little long in the tooth for real desktop application development. Still, I'm not sure that there's another tool that lets you build "quick and dirty prototypes" (with enough functionality to actually test with users) as rapidly as Director.
Avoid the latest version (Director 11) like the plague, though. It's an abomination.
BTW, as a process issue, a "look and feel prototype" is always one of the earliest milestones in our development cycle. The client has to sign off on the interface, and write a check for a progress payment, before we proceed into actual code-slinging. Saves a boat load of headaches to do it this way.
Now I know why javac stole my vacation pictures^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h porn. It was driven by an attacker!
Fixed.