Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:the danger isn't immediately afterwards (Score 1) 117

It's been pointed out (I think correctly) that *the* major source of information for blackhats is the patches themselves. The patch info tells you what it fixes, and then it's relatively easy to reverse-engineer that patch -- and then you go looking for systems that haven't applied that patch, with full knowledge of exactly what to exploit. Patches function as signposts for vulnerabilities.

Funny how after Win2K support ended, there wasn't a rash of new Win2K exploits. Same for Win98. Win95. Win3.x. And not just because "no one is using them anymore" -- as you say, why wait to attack systems *after* they've lost major marketshare?? that would be just plain stupid, since there'd be fewer targets, and the left-behind users are those LEAST likely to have anything worth stealing.

Comment Re:Solid horse (Score 1) 212

Well, I just watched the Belmont on YouTube. That horse has two advantages: he's got more stamina (didn't look at all tired at the end) and he's got more length of shoulder, so he has more reach than average and wastes less motion. Compare his gait to the #2 horse -- not quite the reach, and looked to me like was coming up on out of gas.

Comment Re:Actually it has some medical effects. (Score 1) 110

My background is biochemistry/microbiology. I do grok this stuff. I read a lot of material from JCEM and other professional sources. If this isn't relevant, explain why oral hormones work across species. How much is absorbed varies somewhat, but that's a dosage detail (frex, the oral thyroid dose for a dog is 10x that for a human by weight because dogs don't absorb it as efficiently; however once absorbed by either human or dog it still does the same job, and it doesn't matter if it started life in a pig or a rat, and barring deiodinase deficiency, doesn't even matter if it was synthesized in a laboratory, as is most prescribed today).

Do you know where oral progesterone for human use comes from?? Hint: not from human sources.

JCEM: Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism

Comment Re:Solid horse (Score 1) 212

I don't watch very often anymore since I saw a Derby that was clearly rigged some years back (the horse that looked like he had the most speed was held back hard all the way to the wire -- if his jockey had let him out he'd have won by several lengths) but I happened to see this year's Preakness. And yeah, American Pharaoh looked to me like he had a lot left, in fact I remarked on that after the race.

Comment Re: I really don't care... (Score 2) 212

All racing does is formalize what horses will do on their own. Pasture horses sometimes suffer similar injuries just doing what horses do, which commonly is run full-tilt in a group for no visible purpose. I've seen untrained horses do that, even to the point of exhaustion and laming.

I'd hazard that on a per capita basis, racehorses probably have fewer such injuries than average, because they're a helluva lot more valuable and are far more closely watched and vetted than the average horse. The main difference is that when they have a major injury, the whole world hears about it.

Comment Re:Actually it has some medical effects. (Score 1) 110

Since the study compared eating placentas to eating placentas, what does that have to do with anything? What was goofy was the relative dosage per body weight.

Just because you swallow the hormone doesn't mean it necessarily acts on the wrong organ system. It will still behave the same in the body, since it can't do otherwise (it can only mate up with its own receptors). Otherwise we wouldn't have oral hormone replacement therapy (or oral contraceptives, for that matter), which is commonly used for estrogen, progesterone, and thyroid.

Comment Re:Actually it has some medical effects. (Score 1) 110

Not blind assumption; understanding of biochemistry and hormone systems. Hormones have broadly the same effects across species, and dosage matters.

What would be a lot more informative is an analysis of what hormones are found in a human placenta, and in what quantity and concentration. But "We tried a microdose and nothing happened" isn't exactly definitive.

Comment Re:Actually it has some medical effects. (Score 1) 110

Actually, all it showed was that the effect wasn't present at the dosage used. The rats are eating the entire placenta. If a human consumed an entire placenta, the dosage would be different, and you might see a quite different physiological response. Underdosing a hormone can actually have a paradoxical effect (low dose can be just enough to make the body think it doesn't need to manufacture any of its own, so the serum level of that hormone can actually go *down*).

Comment Re:Actually it has some medical effects. (Score 1) 110

Not really, because hormones are cross-species, and do much the same jobs in every organism that has 'em. We use hormones from various livestock to treat human hormone deficiency; we can be affected by plant estrogens as if they were animal estrogens. Studying hormone interactions in rats creates a good starting point for where we should study human hormone metabolism, but at a vastly accelerated rate (you can examine the hormones during rat births every few weeks; you have to wait 9 months to examine hormones during human births).

From the NIH article, it sounds like what eating the post-partum placenta mostly does is act as short-term birth control by depressing progesterone production. (I wonder what the effect would be from a pre-birth placenta?) Which might have evolved as a way of preventing next-litter competition from arriving too soon in those animals that cycle again immediately after birth.

Comment Re:Fear of guns (Score 1) 535

Indeed, a very lame excuse. Those bus stops shouldn't let people hang around waiting for a bus; anyone might loiter, and public decency would be offended! 'Course when you've got a captive audience like that, well, it must be hard for a hardworking cop to resist.

My college roommate got arrested for sitting on a public curb enjoying the evening (this was in 1973), tho I imagine it had more to do with that he would not give the cops his name. Why wouldn't he give his name? His family had escaped from Soviet Ukraine just after the Stalin era, and he took Constitutional freedoms seriously; you are not required to identify yourself if no crime has been committed. Next morning the judge released him, but even so -- it's the kind of thing that should never happen in the first place.

Comment Re:Fear of guns (Score 1) 535

Actually in some states (CA for one, IIRC) it IS illegal to carry a toy gun unless it's clearly marked with bright pink. Cuz, ya know, realism kills.

Smart criminals will just apply a little spraypaint to their weapons to disguise them as toy guns.

I don't know what they're going to do about the hot-pink rifles they sell at Murdoch's and Cabella's... are they already legally toy guns??

Slashdot Top Deals

All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin

Working...