Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:How to regulate something that is unregulateabl (Score 2, Insightful) 172

The key phrase is about what makes sense.
To a legislator bought by the banking and payday loan industries, there will be a sense of panic to at least be _seen_ to be doing _something_; so that will make sense.
To an ambitious prosecutor, there will appear an opportunity to bring the full weight of the criminal 'justice' system down on some poor schmuck who orders something legal-but-distasteful using MathMoney without paying sales tax or submitting the forms no one can figure out how to order let alone fill out (NJ handgun laws), so that will make sense.

In short, jumping up and down, waving flags and flares, daring regulators to come after you pretty much guarantees the most draconian possible response (designer recreational drugs) because 'think of the children!'

Submission + - Cellphone Unlocking Bill Has One Big Gotcha (itworld.com) 2

itwbennett writes: The cellphone unlocking bill that passed in the House of Representatives on Friday, and which President Obama said he would sign, comes with a catch that will likely prevent you from switching carriers — at least right away: Your existing wireless contract takes precedence over the law. So if your wireless contract says that you can't unlock your phone until your contract expires, you can't do it.

Submission + - When Patients Fear EHRs (informationweek.com)

An anonymous reader writes: When consumers are afraid of electronic health records, their health could actually suffer.

Submission + - It's now possible to print computer memory on paper (citeworld.com)

Caleb Garling writes: Paper is cheap, flexible, and widespread, making it a good candidate as a substrate, but one of the issues with printing conductive materials to paper is one of the reasons paper works so well for ink: absorption. Being porous and uneven is an unwanted quality when trying to lay down the very precise structures necessary for electronics.

To get around this, principal researcher Der-Hsien Lien and team first coated the paper in a layer of carbon. Their aim was to make a type of resistive random access memory (RRAM), where a voltage is applied across a layer of insulator via an electrode. Each "bit" on the paper would be an insulator sandwiched by two electrodes with a state of 1 or 0.

Submission + - Silicon Valley has created an imaginary staffing shortage (usatoday.com)

walterbyrd writes: As longtime researchers of the STEM workforce and immigration who have separately done in-depth analyses on these issues, and having no self-interest in the outcomes of the legislative debate, we feel compelled to report that none of us has been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry's assertions of labor shortages.

Submission + - New protein structure could help treat Alzheimer's, related diseases (washington.edu)

vinces99 writes: There is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, but the research community is one step closer to finding treatment. University of Washington bioengineers have a designed a peptide structure that can stop the harmful changes of the body’s normal proteins into a state that’s linked to widespread diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and Lou Gehrig’s disease. The synthetic molecule blocks these proteins as they shift from their normal state into an abnormally folded form by targeting a toxic intermediate phase. The discovery of a protein blocker could lead to ways to diagnose and even treat a large swath of diseases that are hard to pin down and rarely have a cure.

“If you can truly catch and neutralize the toxic version of these proteins, then you hopefully never get any further damage in the body,” said senior author Valerie Daggett, a UW professor of bioengineering. “What’s critical with this and what has never been done before is that a single peptide sequence will work against the toxic versions of a number of different amyloid proteins and peptides, regardless of their amino acid sequence or the normal 3-D structures.”

Slashdot Top Deals

Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies and Szechwan food.

Working...