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Science

Submission + - Living Earth Simulator Aims to Simulate Everything (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by H3xx
H3xx writes: An international group of scientists are aiming to create a simulator--nicknamed The Living Earth Simulator--that will collect data from billions of sources and use it to replicate everything happening on Earth, from global weather patterns and the spread of diseases to international financial transactions or congestion on highways. The project aims to advance the scientific understanding of what is taking place on the planet, encapsulating the human actions that shape societies and the environmental forces that define the physical world. Perhaps this is Asimov's concept of Psychohistory come to fruition.
Biotech

New Tech Promises Cheap Gene Sequencing In Minutes 121

Posted by CmdrTaco from the but-i-want-it-now dept.
Zothecula writes "Sequencing an entire genome is currently a highly complex, time-consuming process – the DNA must be broken down into segments and replicated, utilizing chemicals that destroy the original sample. Scientists from Imperial College London, however, have just announced the development of a prototype device that could lead to technology capable of sequencing a human genome within minutes, at a cost of just a few dollars. By contrast, when sequencing of the genome of Dr. James Watson (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) was completed in 2007, it had taken two years and cost US$1 million."
Science

Submission + - Cryosat-2 Returns First Map of Arctic Circle (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by H3xx
H3xx writes: The European Space Agency (Esa) satellite Cryosat-2 was launched in April, carrying one of the highest resolution synthetic aperture radars ever put in orbit. Cryosat's primary mission is to measure sea-ice thickness, which has been in sharp decline in recent decades. Its ability also to map the shape of the sea surface will tell scientists if Arctic currents are changing as a result of winds being allowed to blow more easily on ice-free waters.

Today, radar data from the European satellite has been used to make a map of ocean circulation across the Arctic basin.

Comment Re:Just a thought (Score 1) 760

by H3xx (#34597528) Attached to: 'YouCut' Targets National Science Foundation Budget

OK, after we get rid of all the "wasteful" spending at the NSF, can we take a look at the DoD? I have several hundreds of billions of dollars worth of recommendations for spending cuts on that front...

Perhaps it was just an error (or an easter egg) on the part of the server software. Maybe they piped the votes through /bin/tr 'A' 'F' .

Comment History Insurance (Score 1) 488

by H3xx (#34430454) Attached to: WikiLeaks Moves To Swiss Domain After DNS Takedown

I recommend that all of you, your children, your grandmothers and your mothers download the "history insurance" file that was tweeted 3 days ago.

I sense that they will soon give up trying to go about this in a diplomatic fashion and just leak the key for the AES256 encryption. Then BOOM! Thousands of people will have the entire cable archive (or at least a large part of it) on their home computers.
The Internet

The Pirate Bay Co-Founder Starting P2P-DNS 309

Posted by CmdrTaco from the whacamole-is-fun dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Pirate Bay Co-Founder, Peter Sunde, has started a new project which will provide a decentralized p2p based DNS system. This is a direct result of the increasing control which the US government has over ICANN. The project is called P2P-DNS and according to the project's wiki, this is how the project is described: 'P2P-DNS is a community project that will free internet users from imperial control of DNS by ICANN. In order to prevent unjust prosecution or denial of service, P2P-DNS will operate as a distributed and less centralized service hosted by the users of DNS. Temporary substitutes, (as Alpha and Beta developments), are being made ready for deployment. A network with no centralized points of failure, (per the original design of the internet), remains our goal. P2P-DNS is developing rapidly.'"
Patents

Tandberg Attempts To Patent Open Source Code 187

Posted by Soulskill from the cut-and-paste-your-way-to-innovation dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As if the current situation with software patents wasn't bad enough, it appears a new phenomenon is emerging: companies are watching the commit logs of open source projects for ideas to patent. In this case, Tandberg filed a patent that was step-by-step identical to an algorithm developed by the x264 project — a mere two months after the original commit. The particular algorithm is a useful performance optimization in a wide variety of video encoders, including Theora."

Comment Re:Your needs differ as you get older... (Score 1) 418

by H3xx (#34343518) Attached to: Have I Lost My Gaming Mojo?

I feel I'm in the same boat as the OP; I used to game a lot when I was younger. I still remember fondly the first time I played DOOM for so long that I couldn't see straight. Then it was Blood, then Quake, then Half-Life.

The decline started when I decided I was going to uninstall Windows and switch to a completely Linux system six years ago; I decided it wasn't worth the effort to restart my computer and risk infection just so I could play Battlefield 1942 against bots for a few hours. At first I still tried to keep my favorite old games around via projects like prboom, ScummVM and the engines at icculus.org. (Little did I know, this was slowly turning me into a *NIX admin and guru.)

Then, a couple years ago I lost almost everything in a hard drive crash. I decided that was the winds of fate trying to tell me that I should just give up.

Now that I'm 25, I'm a coder by day and a musician/sound engineer by night. I find I don't even have the patience or the hand-eye coordination to play some of the flash games on Newgrounds.

MMORPs seem to be more addicting social habits than games.

I completely agree. I guess I'm lucky never to have gotten into the whole scene (not enough cash, having sex with girls, etc.).
IBM

Coder Accuses IBM of Patenting His Work 249

Posted by samzenpus from the do-your-own-work dept.
ttsiod writes "Back in 2001, I coded HeapCheck, a GPL library for Windows (inspired by ElectricFence) that detected invalid read/write accesses on any heap allocations at runtime — thus greatly helping my debugging sessions. I published it on my site, and got a few users who were kind enough to thank me — a Serbian programmer even sent me $250 as a thank you (I still have his mails). After a few years, Microsoft included very similar technology in the operating system itself, calling it PageHeap. I had more or less forgotten this stuff, since for the last 7 years I've been coding for UNIX/Linux, where valgrind superseded Efence/dmalloc/etc. Imagine my surprise when yesterday, Googling for references to my site, I found out that the technology I implemented, of runtime detection of invalid heap accesses, has been patented in the States, and to add insult to injury, even mentions my site (via a non-working link to an old version of my page) in the patent references! After the necessary 'WTFs' and 'bloody hells' I thought this merits (a) a Slashdotting, and (b) a set of honest questions: what should I do about this? I am not an American citizen, but the 'inventors' of this technology (see their names in the top of the patent) have apparently succeeded in passing this ludicrous patent in the States. If my code doesn't count as prior art, Bruce Perens's Efence (which I clearly state my code was inspired from) is at least 12 years prior! Suggestions/cursing patent trolls most welcome."

Comment Re:Big Cat Joke (Score 2, Interesting) 164

by H3xx (#34333620) Attached to: Apple 1 Computer Sells For $210,700

Apple users prefer the term "Cougar" ;)

"Cougar" is also a term for a middle-aged woman who seduces younger men. The Apple 1 seduced many young men as well, causing them to become obsessed and spend excess amounts of time with it (her?).

...except the Apple 1 is way sexier.

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"What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry Pournelle, about space flight

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