londonit - Slashdot User

Printing Replacement Body Parts 101

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @04:49AM from the portrait-mode dept.

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."

Submission + - Google Android: A Universe of Incompatible Devices (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Monday February 22, 2010 @09:00PM

snydeq writes: "Galen Gruman writes about the dark side of the recent flood of Android smartphones: versions run amok. 'That flood of options should be a good thing — but it's not. In fact, it's a self-destruction derby in action, as phones come out with different versions of the Android OS, with no clear upgrade strategy for either the operating system or the applications users have installed, and with inconsistent deployment of core features. In short, the Android platform is turning out not to be a platform at all, but merely a starting point for a universe of incompatible devices,' Gruman writes. 'This mess leaves developers and users in an unstable position, as each new Android device adds another variation and compatibility question.' In the end, Google's naive approach to open sourcing Android may in fact be precipitating this free-for-all — one that might ultimately turn off both end-users and developers alike."

Movie Review, Hellboy II 277

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday July 14, 2008 @11:50AM from the because-i-can dept.

Although I'm not sure the corporate overlords will let me retroactively expense a movie ticket, I wanted to take a few minutes to write my review of Hellboy II. It's been a pretty good summer for movies already: but Wall-E and Iron Man were pretty much perfect A movies. I was a big fan of the original Hellboy comic, the first movie, and of Pan's Labyrinth- my fear was that it could only go downhill. And I was wrong. VERY wrong. Read on for my review which will be mostly spoiler free.

Open Source Adeona Tracks Lost & Stolen Laptops 192

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday July 14, 2008 @11:08AM from the marco-polo-marco-polo dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there's no need to rely on a single third party. What's more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner's choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop."

Comment Make it Section 508 (Score 1) 663

by londonit on Thursday April 17, 2008 @05:10PM (#23110866) Attached to: Do the Blind Deserve More Effort on the Web?

One of my best friends is blind and works specifically on this problem. If everybody would just follow the W3C guidelines, and not use flash all would be better. Blinds dont use Windows Narrator - that thing only helps them while they get to stick Jaws on the box. Jaws is the industry standard and it handles pretty good most of the crap that's out there - except for FLASH and some AJAX mess. It is not hard - just follow the standard and thats it. In the US section 508 requires that most material - including websites need to be accessible by people with disabilities - not just blind but everybody. Just a bit of common sense.

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