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Steve Jobs Dead At 56 1613

Posted by Soulskill from the rest-in-peace dept.
SoCalChris writes "Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was found dead in his Cupertino home this morning. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him — even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon."
NASA

Shuttle Reentry Over the Continental US 139

Posted by kdawson from the boom-boom dept.
TheOtherChimeraTwin notes that the shuttle Discovery will land at Kennedy Space Center on Monday morning at 8:48 EDT. The craft will make a rare "descending node" overflight of the continental US en route to landing in Florida. Here are maps of the shuttle's path if is lands on orbit 222 as planned, or on the next orbit. Spaceweather.com says: "...it takes the shuttle about 35 minutes to traverse the path shown... Observers in the northwestern USA will see the shuttle shortly after 5 am PDT blazing like a meteoric fireball through the dawn sky. As Discovery makes its way east, it will enter daylight and fade into the bright blue background. If you can't see the shuttle, however, you might be able to hear it. The shuttle produces a sonic double-boom that reaches the ground about a minute and a half after passing overhead."
Image

Slashdot's Disagree Mail 202

Posted by samzenpus from the well-here's-your-problem dept.
Slashdot has one of the best discussion systems there is. It's grown and adapted over the years to meet various challenges and suit the needs of our users. A lot of time and effort has gone into it and we are always open to user input to help make it better. Some of our best ideas start as user suggestions and we appreciate the feedback. Of course they can't all be gems and sometimes the suggestions we get are unworkable or just bizarre. Here are a few of my favorite unhelpful, helpful suggestions.
Security

Report Says China Will Demand Source Code 305

Posted by kdawson from the said-the-spider-to-the-fly dept.
An anonymous reader alerts us to a two-week-old story that hasn't gotten much traction in the press to date. A Japanese newspaper and the AP report that China plans to demand source code from hardware manufacturers, and ban the sale of products from companies that don't comply. China is calling this an "obligatory accreditation system for IT security products." The plan is to go into effect next May, according to sources. "Products expected to be subject to the system are those equipped with secret coding, such as [a] contactless smart card system developed by Sony Corp., digital copiers, and computer servers. The Chinese government said it needs the source code to prevent computer viruses taking advantage of software vulnerabilities and to shut out hackers. However, this explanation is unlikely to satisfy concerns that disclosed information might be handed from the Chinese government to Chinese companies. There also are fears that Chinese intelligence services could exploit such confidential information by making it easier to break codes used in... digital devices."

Comment Re:PCR? With what primers? (Score 1) 150

by Slackcity (#24781267) Attached to: Rover Exiting Crater To Continue Martian Marathon

To paraphrase the article: there is a sequence of nucleotides common to all terrestrial organisms with known end sequences (possibly multiple alleles thereof) and hence known PCR primers. If PCR succeeds that would tell us that DNA of common ancestry was present. Subsequent analysis would tell us the sequence and hence when the organism diverged from terrestrial common ancestor.

The article also addresses contamination and engineering issues.

The article is a slow and difficult read if you don't know PCR in detail but I thought I'd paraphrase as best I can since, while I'm not a molecular biologist, I've spent the last year writing SSO analysis software... As always, wikipedia is your friend.

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Heuristics are bug ridden by definition. If they didn't have bugs, then they'd be algorithms.

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