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Submission + - World's 1st Penis Transplant Done in South Africa (webmd.com)

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: The world's first successful penis transplant has been performed by surgeons in South Africa, Bloomberg News reported Friday. The 21-year-old recipient has made a full recovery and regained all functions in the transplanted organ. The nine-hour operation was done Dec. 11 by surgeons from Stellenbosch University and Cape Town's Tygerberg Hospital, the university said Friday in a statement.

The unidentified patient had his penis amputated three years ago in a life-saving procedure after he developed complications from a traditional circumcision.

"Our goal was that he would be fully functional at two years and we are very surprised by his rapid recovery," said Dr. Andre van der Merwe, head of the university's urology division, who led the surgical team.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Props to Bill Maher 76

Journal by smittyoneeach

"Terrorism is really just bullying, extreme bullying. And I thought we hated bullying now," Maher said.
"Yeah, liberals hate bullying, all right, but they're not opposed to using it. When they casually throw out words like 'bigot' and 'racist,' it does cow people into avoiding this debate," he said.

Credit where due: he's spot on.

Comment Re:This is nothing new for me. (Score 2) 164

Up to now, this only happened when the retailer had a branch where the customer was located; US Retailer w/ branch in Germany selling to a German customer.

Now, all retailers in Europe have to deal with the hassle of having to individualy deal with the seperate tax offices in all the (european) countries its customers are located in.

Abslolute nightmare.

One exception: for b2b deals where the customer has an european tax ID, it's possible to bill without tax and the customer has to pay the tax to its local tax office.

Submission + - Reverse Engineering OpenVPN Access Server? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I need some legal advice from slashdot...

In order to support OpenVPN on mobile platforms, the only decent user experience for configuration is the OpenVPN Access Server interface. The user types in the name of your server and their credentials and they're all configured. If you want the same thing with the OpenVPN community server, you'll probably want the same user experience. A simple tcpdump and analysis with wireshark shows this to be a simple XML-RPC interface. Client support can be achieved implementing just four methods. I'd love to put something together to go with the community client with its easy-rsa configuration... but I'm not sure if I'll run afoul of the DMCA.

Is this reverse engineering? Does simply looking at and decrypting a TCP stream that I have the key to and control of both devices communicating?

Is the work I've done allowed under the reverse engineering clause of the DMCA? If I understand correctly, it is allowed so long as I have not agreed to a EULA that says I won't reverse engineer. The OpenVPN AS server software only asks me to agree to the eula after I run ovpn-init, to which I type "no". Yet the server still starts up without runing ovpn-init.

I think I'm in the clear on this, but I've not yet decided if I want to risk potential legal hassle. So, if nothing else, hopefully this will help anyone else who wants to implement a compatible client or server.

What do you think?

Submission + - Los Angeles Science Teacher suspended over student science fair projects (scpr.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "A high school science teacher at Grand Arts High School in Los Angeles was suspended from the classroom in February, after two of his science fair students turned in projects deemed dangerous by the administrators. " "One project was a marshmallow shooter—which uses air pressure to launch projectiles. The other was an AA battery-powered coil gun—which uses electromagnetism to launch small objects. Similar projects have been honored in past LA County Science Fairs and even demonstrated at the White House."

Submission + - Build your own star!

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: Want to kill the rest of your weekend? Games like 1024 have taken the app world by storm, so why not take the next logical step into geekdom and do what two RPI students have done: make a version that allows you to fuse elements in stars? Going all the way up to Iron, this addictive game is actually pretty good as far as getting most of the science right. Enjoy (and play) Fe[26] here!

Submission + - Why Can't I Turn Off the Adverts?

Submitted by d'baba
d'baba writes: I've got excellent karma (thank you very much) and, always before, I could turn off the adverts. Now, not only can't I turn them off I have them in the Header and Right Column and they are creeping up from the bottom of the page.

Submission + - What's needed for the 60TB hard drive 1

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Within the next 6 years, Seagate expects to produce a 60TB hard disk drive using HAMR technology. But WD and Seagate are currently on separate paths toward expanding capacity. Seagate with Singled Magnetic Recording (SMR) and WD with helium-filled drives. Computerworld has published a series of slides explaining what has been used up until this point and what will be needed to reach the 60TB end goal.

Submission + - Fifty Years Ago IBM 'Bet the Company' on the 360 Series Mainframe

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Those of us of a certain age remember well the breakthrough that the IBM 360 series mainframes represented when it was unveiled fifty years ago on 7 April 1964. Now Mark Ward reports at BBC that the first System 360 mainframe marked a break with all general purpose computers that came before because it was possible to upgrade the processors but still keep using the same code and peripherals from earlier models. "Before System 360 arrived, businesses bought a computer, wrote programs for it and then when it got too old or slow they threw it away and started again from scratch," says Barry Heptonstall. IBM bet the company when they developed the 360 series. At the time IBM had a huge array of conflicting and incompatible lines of computers, and this was the case with the computer industry in general at the time, it was largely a custom or small scale design and production industry, but IBM was such a large company and the problems of this was getting obvious: When upgrading from one of the smaller series of IBM computers to a larger one, the effort in doing that transition was so big so you might as well go for a competing product from the "BUNCH" (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC and Honeywell). Fred Brooks managed the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software support package and based his software classic "The Mythical Man-Month" on his observation that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." The S/360 was also the first computer to use microcode to implement many of its machine instructions, as opposed to having all of its machine instructions hard-wired into its circuitry. Despite their age, mainframes are still in wide use today and are behind many of the big information systems that keep the modern world humming handling such things as airline reservations, cash machine withdrawals and credit card payments. "We don't see mainframes as legacy technology," says Charlie Ewen. "They are resilient, robust and are very cost-effective for some of the work we do."

Submission + - Major Crytograpic Flaw on some new Intel processors (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There is a major cryptographic flaw in some Intel Ivy Bridge processors. A special processor instruction intended to improve you data security is broken on some Ivy Bridge processors. There is a hardware bug inside some of the chips that causes it flake out with an illegal instruction exception when any attempt is made to use the RdRand instruction. You are forced then to rely on deterministic pseudo-random software to configure secure banking etc. This can make it hundreds of millions of times easier to crack your business transactions for example.

Submission + - ( month boy charged with planning a murder! (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by madevan
madevan writes: How can this actually be true. It seems to be.
This 9 month year old boy faces the following charges:
Planning a murder.
Threatening police
  and interfering in state affairs,

Scary for the police — being threatened by a 9 month old baby boy. Was he arrested at gunpoint!

Submission + - Blender Foundation's Sintel video taken down on Youtube for copyright violation (youtube.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As if the automated take downs on Youtube weren't already bad enough, today fans of the popular open source 3D software Blender were greeted by a copyright take down notice for their third open movie, Sintel, despite it being released under a creative commons license: "This video contains content from Sony Pictures Movies & Shows, who has blocked it on copyright grounds." It is believed that the take down was a result of Sony Electronics adding Sintel to their official 4k demo pool.

Submission + - Japan Ordered to Stop Scientific Whaling (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Japan has to stop capturing and killing whales under its whaling program in the Antarctic, called JARPA II, the International Court of Justice has said. In a judgment issued in the Hague in the Netherlands today, the United Nations court has ordered Japan to revoke existing permits to catch whales for scientific purposes, and to stop granting such permits in the future. The ruling is a victory for Australia, which filed Court proceedings against Japan's whaling in 2010, arguing that it breached international obligations.

Submission + - Overuse of Bioengineered Corn Unsurprisingly Gives Rise to Resistant Pests

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Though warned by scientists that overuse of a variety of corn engineered to be toxic to corn rootworms would eventually breed rootworms with resistance to its engineered toxicity, the agricultural industry went ahead and overused the corn anyway with little EPA intervention. The corn was planted in 1996. First reports of rootworm resistance were officially documented in 2011, though agricultural scientists weren't allowed by seed companies to study the engineered corn until 2010. The corn's continued over-use is predicted given current trends, and as resistance eventually spreads to the whole rootworm population, farmers will be forced to start using pesticides once more, thus negating the economical benefits of the engineered corn. 'Rootworm resistance was expected from the outset, but the Bt seed industry, seeking to maximize short-term profits, ignored outside scientists. The next pest-fighting trait “will fall under the same pressure and the insect will win."'

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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

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