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The Kepler spacecraft finds exoplanets by the transit method, looking for drops in light intensity of stars when the planet passes in front of the star. This allows them to measure the radius of the planet relative to the star. So in this case, they usually have the radius, but not the mass, at least without making some assumptions. While sometimes they might have already made those assumptions to make comparisons like this in the news, looking here suggests that it has a radius that is 30-40% larger than Earth, while a mass on the order 2.6 times Earth's.

Yeah, I can't help but think that there's a lot more to creating a life bearing planet than simply forming from more or less the right components at the right distance from the sun.

I've long held that there's a good chance that the impact that created our moon, even the presence of our freaky-huge moon* was essential for the development of life, or at least complex multicellular life.

If to get life you need:
1. right distance from sun
2. The right mix of materials - CO2**, hydrocarbons, just the right amount of water, etc...
3. Lack of the wrong materials - too much any of a huge list.
4. magnetic field - strong enough to keep the radiation down, but not too large...
5. Active tectonic system. Enough that you get land masses above the water. Oh, and because eruptions help provide chemicals that may be deadly in large doses, but are required at low levels. Plus oceanic vents and such provide more spots for life to evolve(see extremophiles).
6. Huge moon(or other way to get significant and varying tides to act as 'mixers' for early life spots)

etc... On the 'upside', it might mean that there's a lot of planets out there that we could terraform with some effort.

*Seriously. Look at the moon:planet mass ratio for every other planet in the solar system. Only Pluto scored higher, and it was demoted from being a planet.
**As far as I know, 'All' of our oxygen was generated by early life.

In fact, I don't see how these two are mutually exclusive.

They are not mutually exclusive, but undertakings as substantial as building a network of telescopes would certainly be, will always be at the expense of something else. And there are plenty of those "somethings", that should have a higher priority, in my not so humble opinion.

Doing both, or the cheaper first is good, sound science.

No. Because the two fields — hunting for exo-planets and developing the theory of very fast space-travel — are not much related, there is no synergy in doing both at once. Various scientists may choose to pursue either (or both) as they please, but no coordinated effort needs to be extended to further increase the list of destinations before we even know, we'll ever be able to reach any of them.

Then what? What's the point without a destination?

The point of my posting was that we already have — using the old imperfect methods — compiled a list of destinations. We can continue looking for them, but studding the entire globe with uber-telescopes, as NotingHere insisted, seems pointless until we can (or, at least, come close to being able to) reach any of them in reasonable time.

How many of these planets are in the goldilocks zone? Sure we can find them; but which ones are livable for Carbon based lifeforms?

According to the catalog, 10 (out of 885) are confirmed so far. From the catalog, "Gliese 581d, Kepler-22b, Gliese 667Cc, Gliese 581g, Gliese 163c, HD 40307g, Tau Cetie, Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f, and Kepler-61b are the only known exoplanets that might be considered potentially habitable or object of interest for the search for life.

There are a further 18 (out of 2716) unconfirmed Kepler candidates that (if they are not false positives) also may reside in their habitable zones. These should be confirmed (or rejected) in due course. Of course, "potentially habitable" does not mean you want to start considering a new vacation home. If Venus and Mars were reversed (i.e., Venus was in Mars's orbit, and Mars in Venus's), each would probably be nicely habitable. As they are, not so much, at least, not without a considerable amount of planetary engineering.

I forgot to include the link to the research at Arecibo.

I think what you are looking for -- developed by PR-minded astronomers at the "Planetary Habitability Laboratory" -- is this classificattion
        1.1 Earth Similarity Index (ESI)
        1.2 Standard Primary Habitability (SPH)
        1.3 Habitable Zones Distance (HZD)
        1.4 Planetary Class (pClass)
        1.5 Habitable Class (hClass)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_potential_habitable_exoplanets
The website has deceptive exoplanet icons as well -- http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog

I would look it up and try to tell you... but everything's hosed from all the traffic. That information will probably come out later. Notably, sites like The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog aren't updated to include it yet.

http://daimyo.org/node/44
http://blog.eponymous.org/pics/atm1.jpg
http://www.oss.cayey.upr.edu/blogs/tecno4all/wp-co ntent/atmBSOD.jpg

For windows, I use py2exe and have a custom script that makes an innosetup install file. If you are interested, I can dig up this script for you (I think it should actually be a distutils setup, that would be nice) however, they are trivial to make.

For OSX I use BundleBuilder which generates mac bundles and is really, really nice especially since OSX comes with python pre-installed. I even use this script to create non-python bundles.

For linux I use PyInstalelr and tarballs :) There is really no good consistent linux installer, but I have had some success with PyInstaller.

No; the best part is going from basic functionality to Killer System without investing any more money in software. Electronics simulation? Virtualization? Bioinformatics? Come on in, the water's fine.

I will respond to your points individually:

* Application bundles (note that this is specific to Mac OS X):

Only the binaries themselves (such as the ones in Contents/MacOS) have any useful application of the GPL. The rest of the bundle is meant to be replaceable (that's what bundles and resource forks are for). Thus, the binary itself has not been modified, and the resources are merely packaged together with it.

* Installers and SEA builders:

There are at least four options that I can see that are somewhat practical for someone writing such a program:
* Write the program in an interpreted language that needs no compilation (not always possible)
* Cause the program to generate its own source code in response to the user's request (increases the size of the binary)
* License the program under the GPL with a special exception for use of the unmodified program (as PyInstaller http://pyinstaller.hpcf.upr.edu/cgi-bin/trac.cgi does)
* License the program under some other license

P.S. This is all IMHO; It's been awhile since I've read the GPL in full, so I might not fully understand the legal issues here; IANAL; etc.

Well, I'm %99.9999 sure that you can get BioPerl running on a Linux box. Also, for a fun project, grab a copy of your sequence databases of choice and try to install BLAST on the Linux box.

That said, take a look at Chimera, which is an app written at UC San Francisco. It is mostly useful for visualizing, but I know there is a sequence viewer, and some other tools in there too.

Now, for all the aspiring bio geeks I give you BioKnoppix. Go download and burn the ISO. Then use that CD to boot any x86 box into a full Linux install with many of the popular bioinformatics tools already installed.

Enjoy!

-Steve

there's even a BIOKNOPPIX already :). http://bioknoppix.hpcf.upr.edu/

A bit torrent of the iso and md5sum.