sgant - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Does the law have the right direction? (Score 1) 408

by sgant on Sunday March 29, 2009 @10:36AM (#27378937) Attached to: Graphic Artists Condemn UK Ban On Erotic Comics

Child pornography is a subset of the term obscenity (at least, if you're a healthy individual it is).

Although drawing a naked baby being raped by guys in rabbit suits might not involve any children who once or ever will exist, it's still obscene. Lots of laws exist to prevent that level of obscenity. There are lots of reasons why it's obscene. Let's not get into that debate though, there's Wikipedia if we need to look up basic definitions.

You brought up an mental image though when describing the scene. Should I go turn myself into the police for imagining a photo of that and not a drawing?

Seriously, shouldn't what you just wrote be considered "obscene" if we're going to label a drawing of it "obscene"? If so, then the editors of Slashdot have a legal obligation to remove all reference to your post.

NASA Employees Fight Invasive Background Check 354

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday August 30, 2007 @08:04PM from the watching-the-watchmen dept.

Electron Barrage writes "Longtime JPL scientists, many of whom do not work on classified materials, including rover drivers and Apollo veterans, sued NASA, Caltech, and the Department of Commerce today to fight highly invasive background checks, which include financial information, any and all retail business transactions, and even sexual orientation."

One Species' Genome Discovered Inside Another's 224

Posted by Zonk on Thursday August 30, 2007 @07:01PM from the it's-a-mad-house-a-mad-house dept.

slyyy writes "The Universtiy of Rochester has discovered the complete genome of a bacterial parasite inside the genome of the host species. This opens the possibility of exchanging DNA between unrelated species and changing our understanding of the evolutionary process. From the article: 'Before this study, geneticists knew of examples where genes from a parasite had crossed into the host, but such an event was considered a rare anomaly except in very simple organisms. Bacterial DNA is very conspicuous in its structure, so if scientists sequencing a nematode genome, for example, come across bacterial DNA, they would likely discard it, reasonably assuming that it was merely contamination--perhaps a bit of bacteria in the gut of the animal, or on its skin. But those genes may not be contamination. They may very well be in the host's own genome. This is exactly what happened with the original sequencing of the genome of the anannassae fruitfly--the huge Wolbachia insert was discarded from the final assembly, despite the fact that it is part of the fly's genome.'"

Submission + - Is age 40 too old for IT or Software Development?

Submitted by on Sunday March 04, 2007 @02:17PM

An anonymous reader writes: I have read some stuff on Dice.com's message boards where some people are claiming that after age 40 or so that jobs become very scarce in the IT profession. I was wondering how prevalent this really is, and in particular I was wondering how hard it would be to actually start a career in IT or Software Development at age 40.

I recently finished up a degree in physics, and I have done a little basic IT support as well as some programming as part of my job working in an environmental testing lab. How difficult would it be to start a computer career at age 40, and what industries and fields will have the most problem with my age and which will have the least problem with my age?

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