Aggregator

The council admitted that facilities had become outdated and that the building's standards had fallen

Former Moldovan MP Veaceslav Platon was arrested on Thursday in central London in connection with the 'Laundromat' operation that is said to have moved vast sums of criminal cash.

Don't laugh. This kind of warning shows crims are getting desperate

Dark web analysts at infosec software vendor Fortra have discovered an extortion crew named Ox Thief that threatened to contact Edward Snowden if a victim didn’t pay to protect its data – a warning that may be an indicator of tough times in the ransomware world for some, at least.…

Vrbo's Holiday Homes of the Year were selected based on their 'exceptional guest ratings' and 'standout amenities'. All of the properties are run by hosts with a 'track record of excellent guest service'.

I inherited half of mothers property after her partner died in 2023. She died 24 years ago. Will I face a capital gains tax bill because of this?

A newly FDA-approved form of adaptive deep-brain stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson's disease adjusts electrical stimulation in real time based on an individual's brain signals, improving symptom control and reducing medication dependence. Scientific American: For decades, Keith Krehbiel took high doses of medications with a debilitating side effect -- severe nausea -- following his diagnosis with early-onset Parkinson's disease at age 42 in 1997. When each dose wore off, he experienced dyskinesia -- involuntary, repetitive muscle movements. In his case, this consisted of head bobbing and weaving. Krehbiel is among one million Americans who live with this progressive neurological disorder, which causes slowed movements, tremors and balance problems. But soon after surgery to implant electrodes into specific areas of his brain in 2020, his life dramatically improved. "My tremor went away almost entirely," says Krehbiel, now age 70 and a professor emeritus of political science at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, whose Parkinson's symptoms began at age 40 and were initially misdiagnosed as repetitive stress injury from computer use. "I reduced my Parkinson's meds by more than two thirds," he adds. "And I no longer have a sensation of a foggy brain, nor nausea or dyskinesia." Krehbiel was the first participant to enroll in a clinical trial testing a new form of deep-brain stimulation (DBS), a technology that gained approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for Parkinson's tremor and essential tremor in 1997 (it was later approved for other symptoms and conditions). The new adaptive system adjusts stimulation levels automatically based on the person's individual brain signals. In late February it received FDA approval for Parkinson's disease "based on results of the international multicenter trial, which involved participants at 10 sites across a total of four countries -- the U.S., the Netherlands, Canada and France. This technology is suitable for anyone with Parkinson's, not just individuals in clinical trials, says Helen Bronte-Stewart, the recent trial's global lead investigator and a neurologist specializing in movement disorders at Stanford Medicine. "Like a cardiac pacemaker that responds to the rhythms of the heart, adaptive deep-brain stimulation uses a person's individual brain signals to control the electric pulses it delivers," Bronte-Stewart says. "This makes it more personalized, precise and efficient than older DBS methods." "Traditional DBS delivers constant stimulation, which doesn't always match the fluctuating symptoms of Parkinson's disease," adds neurologist Todd Herrington, another of the trial's investigators and director of the deep-brain stimulation program at Massachusetts General Hospital. With adaptive DBS, "the goal is to adjust stimulation in real time to provide more effective symptom control, fewer side effects and improved patient quality of life." Current FDA approval of this adaptive system is for the treatment of Parkinson's only, not essential tremor, dystonia (a neurological disorder that causes excessive, repetitive and involuntary muscle contractions) or epilepsy, which still rely on traditional, continuous DBS, Herrington says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

He has been jailed for eight years for the crime

A British study found that those who boosted their diet with these foods slowed the disease's rate of progression by as much as 42 per cent.

When it comes to networking, the rules around here at The Next Platform are simple. …

Nvidia Weaves Silicon Photonics Into InfiniBand And Ethernet was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Alex had the misfortune to work on the kind of application which has forms with gigantic piles of fields, stuffed haphazardly into objects. A single form could easily have fifty or sixty fields for the user to interact with.

That leads to C# code like this:

private static String getPrefix(AV_Suchfilter filter) { String pr = String.Empty; try { int maxLength = 0; if (filter.Angebots_id != null) { maxLength = getmaxLength(maxLength, AV_MessagesTexte.Reportliste_sf_angebotsID.Length); } if (filter.InternesKennzeichen != null) { if (filter.InternesKennzeichen.Trim() != String.Empty) { maxLength = getmaxLength(maxLength, AV_MessagesTexte.Reportliste_sf_internesKennzeichen.Length); } } if (filter.Angebotsverantwortlicher_guid != null) { maxLength = getmaxLength(maxLength, AV_MessagesTexte.Reportliste_sf_angebotsverantwortlicher.Length); } // Do this another 50 times.... // and then .... int counter = 0; while (counter < maxLength) { pr += " "; counter++; } } catch (Exception error) { ErrorForm frm = new ErrorForm(error); frm.ShowDialog(); } return pr; }

The "Do this another 50 times" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in here. What really infuriates me about it, though, which we can see here, is that not all of the fields we're looking at are parameters to this function. And because the function here is static, they're not instance members either. I assume AV_MessagesTexte is basically a global of text labels, which isn't a bad way to manage such a thing, but functions should still take those globals as parameters so you can test them.

I'm kidding, of course. This function has never been tested.

Aside from a gigantic pile of string length comparisons, what does this function actually do? Well, it returns a new string which is a number of spaces exactly equal to the length of the longest string. And the way we build that output string is not only through string concatenation, but the use of a while loop where a for loop makes more sense.

Also, just… why? Why do we need a spaces-only-string the length of another string? Even if we're trying to do some sort of text layout, that seems like a bad way to do whatever it is we're doing, and also if that's the case, why is it called getPrefix? WHY IS OUR PREFIX A STRING OF SPACES THE LENGTH OF OUR FIELD? HOW IS THAT A PREFIX?

I feel like I'm going mad.

But the real star of this horrible mess, in my opinion, is the exception handling. Get an exception? Show the user a form! There's no attempt to decide if or how we could recover from this error, we just annoy the user with it.

Which isn't just unique to this function. Notice the getmaxLength function? It's really a max and it looks like this:

private static int getmaxLength(int old, int current) { int result = old; try { if (current > old) { result = current; } } catch (Exception error) { ErrorForm frm = new ErrorForm(error); frm.ShowDialog(); } return result; }

What's especially delightful here is that this function couldn't possibly throw an exception. And you know what that tells me? This try/catch/form pattern is just their default error handling. They spam this everywhere, in every function, and the tech lead or architect pats themselves on the back for ensuring that the application "never crashes!" all the while annoying the users with messages they can't do anything about.

.comment { border: none; } [Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!

Senior councillor raises concerns about impact of charges which are 'not welcome'

To everyone around her, Kerry Soorley appeared put-together. She seemed happy and was always the life of the party after a couple of drinks. Behind closed doors, she was a different woman.

The locals are all very excited to have their local pub back

The attorney for Blake Lively's It Ends With Us costar Justin Baldoni sounded defiant when he was asked about the possibility of a settlement during a recent podcast.

Another success for the 'Moonshot factory' and an extra rival for Starlink et al

Google’s attempt to provide remote area connectivity with balloons has been floated out as an independent company, a rare success for the company’s attempt to develop breakthrough technologies.…

A man who has a “massive passion” for building circus models is hoping to find other budding builders in Braintree.

The bus has left passengers in 'vulnerable situations'

Patrick Schwarzenegger and his fiancé, Abby Champion, stripped down to their underwear for SKIMS' 2025 Wedding Shop campaign.

With his athletic frame and good looks, and fans such as the Princess of Wales and Anna Wintour, he seems destined for stardom both on and off the court.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: More than 400 Hollywood creative leaders signed an open letter to the Trump White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, urging the administration to not roll back copyright protections at the behest of AI companies. The filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians and others -- which included Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Erivo, Cate Blanchett, Cord Jefferson, Paul McCartney, Ron Howard and Taika Waititi -- were submitting comments for the Trump administration's U.S. AI Action Plan. The letter specifically was penned in response to recent submissions to the Office of Science and Technology Policy from OpenAI and Google, which asserted that U.S. copyright law allows (or should allow) allow AI companies to train their system on copyrighted works without obtaining permission from (or compensating) rights holders. "We firmly believe that America's global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries," the letter says in part. The letter claims that "AI companies are asking to undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music and voices used to train AI models at the core of multibillion-dollar corporate valuations." [...] The letter says Google and OpenAI "are arguing for a special government exemption so they can freely exploit America's creative and knowledge industries, despite their substantial revenues and available funds. There is no reason to weaken or eliminate the copyright protections that have helped America flourish." You can read the full statement and list of signatories here. The letter was issued in response to recent submissions from OpenAI (PDF) and Google (PDF) claiming that U.S. law allows, or should allow, AI companies to train their programs on copyrighted works under the fair use legal doctrine.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.