FITS is the ubiquitous data format in astronomy, see http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/ - it has idiosyncrasies from arising originally in the 1970's, but is extremely portable and forgiving of a wide range of host operating systems and development environments. The specification has also been published in the refereed astronomical literature, making it suitable for very long term (even in astronomical terms) archival storage. Hence the interest of the Vatican in using this for their manuscripts. Recent data compression work is quite state of the art (if I do say so myself), and would be applicable to other scientific image or table formats, including your homebrew format.

Regarding FITS (Flexible Image Transport System), if this is used in significant ways in medical imaging, the astronomical FITS user community would love to know about it and collaborate. Regarding rice-compressed FITS, I (and undoubtedly my coauthors) would be beyond fascinated to learn of either medical imaging use cases or compression tools for this purpose. Alternately, any FITS-based medical imaging applications should be aware of the astronomical data compression work accessible through http://heasarc.nasa.gov/fitsio/fpack (hopefully I'm not slashdotting myself :-) Another field planning to use FITS is digital manuscript archiving per the Vatican ( http://bit.ly/aagZxN ). Regarding the topic of this thread, the comments here emphasize that the real issue is standardizing on data formats. The richer the community (and none are richer than health and medicine), the richer the software ecosystem.

Publishing physical books and e-books are two different things. The market niches are complementary. If a company like Borders goes bankrupt it's because they've failed to comprehend the complete mix of markets they compete in, not because one part of the business cannibalized another.

There are reasons to be skeptical that paper books will become extinct any time soon. The great strengths of e-books are also their weaknesses - in particular the book is only as permanent as the battery in the e-book reader, and the reader is a fragile device. A fat paperback can even be ripped in half down the spine to improve portability without harming the reading "experience". Textbooks? Artbooks? Etc.

The success of the physical book business is only loosely tied to the satisfaction of the readers. It is much more tightly connected to the profitability of the publishing workflow. As soon as Amazon, etc., solved the mail order scalability problem - an issue related to physical books, not e-books - physical book stores quaked. Really, the readers are more product than customer here - their loyalty traded back and forth between vendors vying for their business.

The next step in dismantling the publishing industry is the printing workflow itself. Send a PDF to lulu.com and you can immediately order a very nice paperback with a single copy price of $5.77 (depending on page count, etc.) Chop a couple of bucks off of that for an order of a few hundred.

Don't forget the layered protocols: http://www.cis.udel.edu/~mills/ipin.html

I note exactly one comment out of more than a hundred that not only appears to question the "butterfly net in space" meme, but bothered to track down the likely project: http://www.timog.com/brb/jaxa-plans-to-clean-up-space-debris-with-hi-tech-net As the picture shows (perhaps there are Japanese sources with real details), the idea is to send a tether to dock with a specific satellite at its end-of-life. Both tether and satellite would then de-orbit. This is really a substitute for building end-of-life capabilities into the original satellite. ...or maybe 1 out of 100 is a good batting average for slashdot.

The entire lifespan of massive stars is sped up. In the few tens of millions of years encompassing the period from the birth of Betelgeuse to its death, not only would life have had no time to evolve, but planets might never have formed (at least, not suitable planets).

Crewcuts don't make them bad guys, and warrants don't make them good guys. Big Brother (yours, mine or ours) is "sharing" in vast amounts of data without warrants. Now is the time for your tears...

At that price point there are important features missing...

But the crossdressing time traveler had the great benefit of reading this trenchant thread on /. while in grade school. S/he is reading this message right now while looking forward to the finale of Project Runway tonight. Oh the horror of the fashion choices that await her in the future in the past!

Alexander the Great solved the same problem with the Gordian Knot in the 4th century BCE. Smash the scanner. The modern improvement would be to disable it less flamboyantly and enjoy the theatrical performances of the assistant principle and custodial supervisor standing around scratching their heads.

Your lap has ethernet?

What if we put the shades into a geo stationary orbit hovering only over the deepest parts of the ocean.

As somebody else pointed out, that's not how GEOstationary orbits work. They are stationary with respect to the Earth, not the Sun moving across the sky. Rather, the notion is to place sunshades in orbits around the Earth-Sun L1 point (Lagrange worked out these specific solutions to the three-body problem) where the teeter-totter gravity of each body balances out. Google "Roger Angel".

Also, the atmosphere is well mixed, such that cooling the air over one place cools it everywhere. You might be able to enhance cooling in latitude bands relative to the six Hadley cells (3 north, 3 south). This could be handy for tweaking the North Atlantic Drift that keeps Europe happy and habitable. Of course, global warming is expected to affect the Hadley circulation itself, but as long as the equator remains warmer than the poles, the air that goes up must come down generating an odd number of cells. An interesting notion whether we could tweak the shading asymmetrically to result in differing numbers of cells north and south.

Whether we should pursue such a project is doubtful, but it would be good to work out the details before we find that we must pursue such a project.

A mathematical amusement causes people confusion and consternation. It's like asking someone why they appear reversed left-to-right in a mirror, but not top-to-bottom, and saying there's an inconsistency in the foundation of physics.

Mirrors reverse front-to-back, not left-to-right. This flips parity ("handedness"), but the rays still trace straight lines at the top, bottom, and sides.

Invisibility is an ancient notion and tampering with video as old as the Lumière brothers. What is new here is the trend toward placing these capabilities closer and closer to the camera. Combine such effects with the face detection algorithm that is already in your phone's camera and the original picture can remove or replace individuals from the scene of the crime. "Ground truth" will be ever more difficult to establish.

Read "Double Fold" by Nicholson Baker: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/baker-fold.html Digitization need not be destructive, but often has been. Digital records fill a different need than physical records and the quixotic pursuit of permanency benefits from retaining both in diverse formats and at numerous locations.