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Biotech

Scientists Create Programmable Bacteria 117

Posted by samzenpus from the anti-coding-soap dept.
wilmavanwyk writes "In research that further bridges the biological and digital world, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco have created bacteria that can be programmed like a computer. Researchers built 'logic gates' – the building blocks of a circuit – out of genes and put them into E. coli bacteria strains. The logic gates mimic digital processing and form the basis of computational communication between cells, according to synthetic biologist Christopher A. Voigt."
Earth

Doubling of CO2 Not So Tragic After All? 747

Posted by samzenpus from the let-the-flame-war-begin dept.
carvalhao writes "The Register reports on a study from NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that claims that new climate models that account for the effects of increased CO2 levels on plant growth result on a 1.64 C increase for a doubling of CO2 concentrations, a far less gloomy scenario than previously considered."
Linux

Paleontologists Unearth Giant Fossilized Penguin 124

Posted by Soulskill from the syfy-already-working-on-a-horror-movie dept.
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The BBC reports that scientists have discovered the 36-million-year-old fossil of a penguin nearly five feet tall and almost twice the weight of an Emperor Penguin, the largest living species. 'The heavier the penguin, the deeper it dives,' says Julia Clarke, a palaeontologist at the University of Texas. 'If that holds true for any penguins, then the dive depths achieved by these giant forms would've been very different.' The bird, named Inkayacu paracasensis, or water king, lived during the late Eocene period and had a long, straight beak, much longer than that of its modern relatives. But, most surprisingly, the giant penguin's feathers were brown and gray, distinct from the black 'tuxedo'" Reader SpuriousLogic notes that it's also getting easier to keep an eye on modern penguins, since Google has extended Street View to Antarctica.
Cellphones

Nokia Paying $10M For Symbian Software Devs 210

Posted by Soulskill from the desperation-mode-kicks-in dept.
colordev writes "Yesterday Nokia and AT&T announced a mobile software coding contest worth $10 million in prize money. The move is intended to help Symbian compete with Android and iOS. The day before this announcement, Sony Ericsson said it would not be making any new Symbian devices and is instead focusing on Android. That left Nokia pretty much alone with Symbian, and now it wants to find new coding 'friends' to keep the platform alive. Natural selection seems to be slowly eroding Symbian's future. Is this contest too late?"
Databases

Swedes Cast Write-In Votes for SQL Injection, Donald Duck 210

Posted by timothy from the anybody-but-pirate-party dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Swedish elections were held recently (the third Sunday of September to be exact) and it seems that a few people tried to interfere with the election by voting for parties which were in effect named to be SQL injection attacks or similar. Clever stuff! Little Bobby Tables in real life." That wasn't the only oddity of the election; reader MZeroOne writes: "The Swedish Election Authority published the results of last Sunday's general election and even though the current prime minister retained power, the candidate who got the most individual handwritten votes was Disney's Donald Duck." Maybe the existence of the Hard Alcohol Party (237 votes) helps explain why the Pirate Party didn't have a better showing.
Security

Stuxnet Worm May Have Targeted Iranian Reactor 322

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stux-on-this dept.
yuna49 writes "Analysis of the Stuxnet worm suggests its target might have been Iran's nuclear program. "Last week Ralph Langner, a well-respected expert on industrial systems security, published an analysis of the Stuxnet worm, which targets Siemens software systems, and suggested that it may have been used to sabotage Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor. A Siemens expert, Langner simulated a Siemens industrial network and then analyzed the worm's attack. Experts had first thought that Stuxnet was written to steal industrial secrets, but Langner found something quite different. The worm actually looks for very specific Siemens settings — a kind of fingerprint that tells it that it has been installed on a very specific Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) device — and then it injects its own code into that system."

Comment Re:translation hard to understand... (Score 3, Interesting) 442

by Taagehornet (#33619376) Attached to: Swiss Canton Abandons Linux Migration

No, Google Translate get's it wrong. The article actually only says that certain *parts* of the project were delayed till 2006:

Ein Ziel, das nicht zu schaffen war, unter anderem, weil *einige* Ausschreibungen für das Projekt erst 2006 anliefen.

Which roughly translates to:

A target that could never be met, partly because *some* contracts only went out to tender as late as 2006.

Comment Re:Microsoft borrowing ideas from Apple again? (Score 1) 352

by Taagehornet (#33598426) Attached to: Promised Microsoft Tablet 'No Thicker Than Sheet of Glass'

Jeez. You brought this back up from your capture file. This is the exact same quote I replied to half a year ago or so...

Sorry to disappoint you, but I don't recall having ever discussed anything relating to this with you. But true, I've linked to Bill Buxton's write-up before, and I figure I'd better apologize in advance, cause I'll probably do it again. Even though it wasn't written yesterday it's still an excellent piece.

Yes, I'm quite aware of the central theme of the article, I've actually read it, and if you hadn't been so eager to reply, you might have spotted that I did include the paragraph you echoed a second time.

But thanks for your reply, and despite the harsh tone, I doubt we disagree about anything here at all.

Though Steve Jobs' habit of claiming ownership of all great inventions rubs me the wrong way (this year Apple invented videotelephony), Apple deserves credit for their work on the iPhone; it was nothing short of a revolution.

Comment Re:Microsoft borrowing ideas from Apple again? (Score 1) 352

by Taagehornet (#33587844) Attached to: Promised Microsoft Tablet 'No Thicker Than Sheet of Glass'

Well played sir, well played. However:

[...] my group at the University of Toronto was working on multi-touchin 1984 (Lee, Buxton & Smith, 1985), the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. [...] Wayne Westerman, co-founder of FingerWorks, a company that Apple acquired early in 2005, and now an Apple employee:

Westerman, Wayne (1999). [...] U of Delaware PhD Dissertation

Comment Re:Microsoft borrowing ideas from Apple again? (Score 3, Informative) 352

by Taagehornet (#33585214) Attached to: Promised Microsoft Tablet 'No Thicker Than Sheet of Glass'

Bill Buxton isn't just some random Microsoft employee, he's one of the pioneers of the industry, and has been working with multi-touch systems since back in the early eighties.

Contrary to popular belief Apple didn't invent multi-touch

Multi-touch technologies have a long history. To put it in perspective, my group at the University of Toronto was working on multi-touchin 1984 (Lee, Buxton & Smith, 1985), the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. Furthermore, during the development of the iPhone, Apple was very much aware of the history of multi-touch, dating at least back to 1982, and the use of the pinch gesture, dating back to 1983. This is clearly demonstrated by the bibliography of the PhD thesis of Wayne Westerman, co-founder of FingerWorks, a company that Apple acquired early in 2005, and now an Apple employee:

Westerman, Wayne (1999). Hand Tracking,Finger Identification, and Chordic Manipulation on a Multi-Touch Surface. U of Delaware PhD Dissertation: http://www.ee.udel.edu/~westerma/main.pdf

In making this statement about their awareness of past work, I am not criticizing Westerman, the iPhone, or Apple. It is simply good practice and good scholarship to know the literature and do one's homework when embarking on a new product. What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the "great invention" story, real innovation rarely works that way. In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call "the long-nose of innovation."

Microsoft borrowing ideas from Apple again?

It's probably the other way round. Nice troll though.

Patents

Patent Office Admits Truth — Things Are a Disaster 278

Posted by timothy from the but-that-dashboard's-a-good-idea dept.
An anonymous reader writes "For years the US Patent and Trademark Office has published data to show how well it and the patent system were running. Under new leadership, the USPTO has begun to publish a dashboard of information, including a new look at questions like how long does it really take to get a final answer on whether you will receive a patent or not? The pat answer was, on the average, about 3 years. But with the new figures, it's obvious that the real number, when you don't play games with how you define a patent application, is six years. The backlog of patents is almost 730K. And the Commerce Department under the Obama administration wants the average down to 20 months. How does this happen? Only if everyone closes their eyes and pretends. It's time to take drastic action, like ending software patents. As it is, by the time companies get a software patent, there's little value to them because, after six years, the industry has already moved on."

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