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Australian Women Fight Over "Geekgirl" Trademark 187

bennyboy64 writes "Two prominent women in the Australian IT industry are in a bitter dispute over the ownership of the trademark 'geekgirl.' A woman attempting to use 'geekgirl' on Twitter told ZDNet that women had been advised by the trademark owner to stop doing so since she owned the trademark for the word. 'She noted her trademark and asked me to stop calling myself a "geekgirl" in general conversation and to cease using the hashtag "#geekgirl" on Twitter,' IT consultant Kate Carruthers said."
Biotech

Printing Replacement Body Parts 101

Deep Penguin sends in a piece that appeared in The Economist a couple of weeks back about a developing technology to "print" body parts for transplant. "A US and an Australian company have developed the $200,000 machine, which works by depositing stem cells and a 'sugar-based hydrogel' scaffolding material. (The stem cells are harvested from a transplant patient's own fat and bone marrow, to avoid rejection down the line.) The companies are Organovo, from San Diego, specializing in regenerative medicine, and Invetech, an engineering and automation firm in Melbourne, Australia. The initial targets are skin, muscle, and 'short stretches of blood vessels,' which they hope to have available for human implantation within five years. Down the line, they expect the technology could even print directly into the body, bypassing the in-vitro portion of the current process."

Comment Re:No one cares about D (Score 3, Informative) 404

I can't think of something with significant market share, but there is now an indie game on Steam written in D: Mayhem Intergalactic

Additionally, D is link-compatible with C. Using C libraries from D is as easy as porting the header files to D. There are a couple of tools for (mostly) automating this process, and quite a lot of the major C libraries have D bindings available.

Comment Article author shouldn't embellish (Score 4, Informative) 683

Unlike traditional nuclear reactors the new micro reactor uses no control rods to initiate the reaction.

Anyone who knows anything about nuclear reactors knows that control rods certainly do not initiate reactions. They regulate or halt it by absorbing the neutrons that cause it. Maybe the author at "Next energy news" should become a bit more familiar with his/her subject before writing about it.

Comment Re:Python and D (Score 1) 570

There's no way that I can see to do this automatically.

The concern is this (reposted here so people don't have to dig through Pyd's docs):

class Foo {
    void bar() { writefln("Foo.bar"); }
}

void func(Foo f) { f.bar(); }

When we wrap this class and this function with Pyd (or Boost.Python), we can subclass Foo with a Python class:

class PyClass(Foo):
    def bar(self):
        print "PyClass.bar"

The behavior we want is:

>>> o = PyClass()
>>> func(o)
PyClass.bar

However, there's no way to get the D function to polymorphically call the Python subclass's method without user intervention. I cannot generate the required wrapper with templates alone. Therefore, users must write thin wrapper classes in D, and expose the wrappers to Python:

class FooWrap : Foo {
    mixin OverloadShim;
    void bar() {
        get_overload(&super.bar, "bar");
    }
}

get_overload performs a bit of magic, checking if the current object is an actual instance of FooWrap or a Python subclass, and calling the proper method as appropriate.

In the dim and distant future, I may be able to generate code like this in a SWIG-like fashion. D is remarkably easy to parse (perhaps one of the language's strongest advantages over C++), and I have almost completed a D parser written in Python (using Pyparsing). Since Pyd's build utility is written in Python, doing this kind of trickery shouldn't prove too difficult.

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