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Sci-Fi

According To Star Trek: Discovery, Starfleet Still Runs Microsoft Windows (theverge.com) 237

Posted by BeauHD from the final-frontier-indeed dept.
AmiMoJo shares a report from The Verge: The third episode of Star Trek: Discovery aired this week, and at one point in the episode, Sonequa Martin-Green's Michael Burnham is tasked with reconciling two suites of code. In the show, Burnham claims the code is confusing because it deals with quantum astrophysics, biochemistry, and gene expression. And while the episode later reveals that it's related to the USS Discovery's experimental new mycelial network transportation system, Twitter user Rob Graham noted the code itself is a little more pedestrian in nature. More specifically, it seems to be decompiled code for the infamous Stuxnet virus, developed by the United States to attack Iranian computers running Windows.
United States

Obama and Romney Respond To ScienceDebate.org Questionnaire 608

Posted by Soulskill from the pi-is-exactly-3 dept.
rhsanborn writes "President Barack Obama and Republican Presidential Nominee Mitt Romney have both responded to a questionnaire on the 'most important science policy questions facing the United States.' The questionnaire was created by ScienceDebate.org, a group consisting of many influential organizations in science and engineering. The questions are on many topics including research, internet regulation, and climate change."
Hardware

D-Wave Announces Commercially Available Quantum Computer 133

Posted by timothy from the you-either-have-one-or-you-don't dept.
New submitter peetm writes "Computing company D-Wave has announced they're selling a quantum computing system commercially, which they're calling the D-Wave One. The D-Wave system comes equipped with a 128-qubit processor designed to perform discrete optimization operations. A qubit is the basic unit of quantum information – analogous to a bit in conventional computing. For a broader understanding of how qubits work, check out Ars Technica's excellent guide."
Idle

Swedish File-Sharers File For Religious Status 420

Posted by samzenpus from the guided-to-share dept.
nloop writes "A group of file-sharers in Sweden have requested that their religion, Kopimism, be officially recognized in Sweden. Although this status has been denied once in the past the struggle for religious freedom from persecution continues. Aside from deeming CTRL+C CTRL+V as sacred symbols other beliefs include the flow of information being ethically right and closed source software being 'akin to slavery.'"
Biotech

Biologist (Almost) Creates Artificial Life 539

Posted by Soulskill from the almost-doesn't-count dept.
Aditya Malik writes "Wired has an interesting story up about how a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building 'protocells' from artificial molecules which are very close to satisfying the conditions for being 'alive.' 'Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.' This obviously raises some questions about creationism, not to mention some scary bio-research-gone-wild scenarios."
Microsoft

Microsoft Pulls Vista SP1 Update 268

Posted by CmdrTaco from the undo-undo-undo dept.
1shooter writes "news.com reports that Microsoft is withdrawing SP1 for Vista. Nick White, Microsoft product manager blogged 'We've heard a few reports about problems customers may be experiencing as a result of KB937287,' wrote White. 'Immediately after receiving reports of this error, we made the decision to temporarily suspend automatic distribution of the update to avoid further customer impact while we investigate possible causes.'"
Real Time Strategy (Games)

'Neurotic' is Best RTS strategy 186

Posted by CmdrTaco from the better-than-my-strat-of-hide-and-cry dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Austrian researchers experimenting with adding emotion to game AI say that 'neurotic' software is best at RTS. They developed aggressive, defensive, neutral and neurotic bots to play Age of Mythology, based on psychological models of emotion. Neurotic bots beat the standard game AI every time and faster than the other personalities."
Programming

Programmer's Language-Aware Spell Checker? 452

Posted by kdawson from the hands-off-my-camelcase dept.
Jerry Asher writes "Not all of my coworkers are careful about spelling errors. Sometimes this causes real embarrassment as spelling errors creep into software interfaces. Does anyone know of spell checkers for programming languages? I don't want a text spell checker, I want a programming-language-aware spell checker. A spell checker that I can pass all of my code through and will flag spelling errors in function names, variable names, and comments, but will ignore language keywords, language constructs and expressions, and various programming styles (camel code, or underscores, or...). I want a spell checker that knows that void *functionSigniture(char *myRoutine) contains one spelling error. Does anyone have such a thing for Java or C++? Are there any Eclipse plugins that do this?"
Databases

Microsoft Plays Up Open Source 224

Posted by kdawson from the coopetition dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Recently Microsoft's open source software lab posted PostgreSQL on Windows: A Primer. Postgres is one of the longest running open source databases — it has been around for nearly 11 years. The powerful object-relational database is a direct competitor to other OSS databases, as well as Microsoft's SQL Server 2005. So why is Microsoft promoting it? I get Redmond's interest in boosting anything that runs on Windows as a platform. Is this simply a case of left-hand, right-hand, or is something deeper going on?"

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