when laparoscopic surgery came in there were all these studies done that showed one thing or another. for example, a laparoscopic cholecystectomy (removal of the gallbladder) is a very common operation. apparently there are studies done that show 10% of the time you will have damage to the common bile duct (which would be bad). any general surgeon worth his salt these days will tell you that 10% chance is more like 0.5% or better.

my point is, maybe people just need to get better at using these things? it's not like playing a computer game, the surgery is still very complicated.

of course I'm no expert but hey, this is /. isn't it?

I think the worst part is - what if it gets stuck. Those legs look like they could catch on stuff (e.g. ducts, pasts scars/stitches), and if it lost power with the legs fully extended it would certainly be a bumpy ride out of there to say the least. That said I do think the pill cam has the potential to be a good alternative to have a colonoscopy.

Firstly, they're only meant to keep them alive till transplant. Last I heard these devices are still not great, with a huge host of nasty complications. I can't imagine anyone living for more than a year with one of these in. The blood pressure would probably be fine seeing as though I imagine the MAP (mean arterial pressure) would be unchanged, but hey if its only for a year, and I'd be much more worried about the device itself throwing off clots causing strokes and other infarcts.

I did a thesis on honeynets in 2007 and part of it involved running a nepenthes honeypot on a couple of different Australian broadband networks. I was surprised to see on my ISP nepenthes picked up roughly 1 exploit attempt every minute or two and usually from a wide range of local IP addresses (i.e. I wasn't seeing the same computer, I was seeing hundreds or even thousands of infected machines running on my ISPs network). I don't see what would be so difficult for the broadband companies around the world to each set aside a machine or two to run a couple different types of honeypots, and use that info combined with their IP address records to automatically identify and notify customers that their computers are infected. I personally would find such a service very useful and don't understand why it hasn't been done by my ISP yet (apart from the fact that they clearly don't care about the well-being of their customers).

Note that there is absolutely no requirement for ISPs to monitor traffic to implement a honeypot based detection system.

As said by X0563511, the damage that is done by loud noises is destruction of the hair cells (they are responsible for turning the mechanical vibrations into neural transmissions... i.e. loud noises = more mechanical energy = damage and destruction of hair cells). Unfortunatley bone conduction would cause the same problem if utilised at high enough energies (but i'm not sure what that would be and whether any bone conduction headphones would be capable of this). Come to think of it, it could infact be more dangerous as bone conduction bypasses the eardrum and ear bones (ossicles) which mainly has a role in amplification of sound but also provides protection of the hair cells (a tiny muscle can move an ossicle and break or dampen the path of conduction).

As for my opinion of the solution... its actually a tough one. I've got an mp3 player and some really nice bose in-ear headphones which i really enjoying listening to, but i wouldn't class myself as a big music person (i'd probably use it twice a week if that) and so its hard for me or people like me to tell people who love there music to stop it or even just to turn it down. I would like to see more restrictions in place however, so that it is harder for people to turn up their mp3 players to damagingly high levels. Perhaps the responsibility should fall on the shoulders of those that make the mp3 players apple whose product name is now synonymous with sensorineural hearing loss amongst audiologists. This would be unlikely, but maybe there is a way it could work. Perhaps even offering two models... one that has built in ear-protection (it would have to take in sound level as well as listening time). I'd personally love it if a storeperson asked me if i'd like my music player with or without hearing loss :)