Comment An important feature (Score 1) 606
Self-destruct.
ESA Embraces Open Source With New SAR Toolbox 62
phyr writes "The European Space Agency (ESA) has released its Next ESA SAR Toolbox (NEST) freely as GPL for Linux and Windows. It provides an integrated viewer for reading, calibrating, post-processing and analysis of ESA (ERS 1&2, ENVISAT) and 3rd party (Radarsat2, TerraSarX, Alos Palsar, JERS) SAR level 1 data and higher. ESA has chosen to distribute the software as fully open source to allow the remote sensing community to easily develop new readers/writers and post-processors for SAR data with their NEST Java API. The software provides both a command line interface and GUI for all features including data conversion, graph processing, coregistration, multilooking, filtering, and band arithmetic."
New Method To Revolutionize DNA Sequencing 239
An anonymous reader writes "A new method of DNA sequencing published this week in Science identifies incorporation of single bases by fluorescence. This has been shown to increase read lengths from 20 bases (454 sequencing) to >4000 bases, with a 99.3% accuracy. Single molecule reading can reduce costs and increase the rate at which reads can be performed. 'So far, the team has built a chip housing 3000 ZMWs [waveguides], which the company hopes will hit the market in 2010. By 2013, it aims to squeeze a million ZMWs [waveguides] onto a single chip and observe DNA being assembled in each simultaneously. Company founder Stephen Turner estimates that such a chip would be able to sequence an entire human genome in under half an hour to 99.999 per cent accuracy for under $1000.'"
Comment Stupid. (Score 1) 336
This proposed "filter" promotes exactly the kind of behavior it claims to prevent, and there are already methods in place to reduce the presence of "stupidity" when we need to.
So wait, let's stop and think of what we see as "stupid" on the Internet. From what I've gathered from the consensus of people on Slashdot, stupid is anything you find in the comments on digg.com. In general, these comments tend to have elitist qualities with chauvanistic implications like "my penis is bigger than yours because of arbitrary qualifications x1, x2, ..., xn". In other words, they give you the sense you're in a junior high classroom. Now, this filter turns the former statement into "my penis is bigger than yours because i'm more intelligent than you are". It's just as elitist, and just as invalid. There are people you might call stupid, but they happen to be CONSIDERATE and they are at least willing to learn, or to change.
We already have means for dealing with this as well. In closed forums, we ban the offending individual. In open forums, since they're open and all, we ignore them.
I really fail to see the necessity of any sort of filter, unless it's to impose your own, elitist regime on everyone else.
So wait, let's stop and think of what we see as "stupid" on the Internet. From what I've gathered from the consensus of people on Slashdot, stupid is anything you find in the comments on digg.com. In general, these comments tend to have elitist qualities with chauvanistic implications like "my penis is bigger than yours because of arbitrary qualifications x1, x2,
We already have means for dealing with this as well. In closed forums, we ban the offending individual. In open forums, since they're open and all, we ignore them.
I really fail to see the necessity of any sort of filter, unless it's to impose your own, elitist regime on everyone else.
OpenBSD 4.1 Released 218
adstro writes to quote from the BSD mailing list: "We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.1. This is our 21st release on CD-ROM (and 22nd via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of ten years with only two remote holes in the default install. As in our previous releases, 4.1 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system."
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"Unibus timeout fatal trap program lost sorry" - An error message printed by DEC's RSTS operating system for the PDP-11
