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Enlarge / A system view, with navigation between planets, and a fleet status? This is looking very Star Control to me! (credit: Stardock)

All right, *campers*, there’s some new news lurking on the horizon for Star Control fans eager to find a new *happy town*. This morning, Stardock founder Brad Wardell announced the official name of the company’s upcoming Star Control prequel: Star Control: Origins. Wardell has also offered up the first public gameplay video:

(video link)

Today’s announcement also gives us a tentative release date and an early price: the game will be coming to Windows and consoles, and the PC release will be in the second half of 2017. For $35 (£30), players can join the studio’s “Founder’s Program” and get access to the closed beta and some additional developer goodies.

In August, Microsoft announced that it was going to change the patching model used by Windows 7 and 8.1—as well as Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, and 2012 R2—to something close to that of Windows 10.

In a break from Microsoft's older operating systems, Windows 10's monthly updates incorporate both security and non-security fixes into a single monolithic update. These updates combine not only each month's new fixes, but also the fixes from previous months. A similar system is being offered to those older operating systems. The patch on October 11 is the first time this new system is being used.

The patch system for the legacy operating systems has complexities that Windows 10's patching lacks. There will be three series of updates in total. Two of these updates will be a monthly roll-up that combines security and non-security fixes, as well as a monthly security update that contains only that month's security fixes without any previous ones. They will be released on the second Tuesday of each month, known as "Patch Tuesday." The third update will be a preview of the next month—which combines the current month's cumulative update with the next month's non-security fixes—and will be published on the third Tuesday of each month. This will give users the ability to test the non-security portion of each month's patch before it's rolled out.

Enlarge / What the view of Mars might look like from inside the Interplanetary Transport System. (credit: SpaceX)

Elon Musk finally did it. Fourteen years after founding SpaceX, and nine months after promising to reveal details about his plans to colonize Mars, the tech mogul made good on that promise Tuesday afternoon in Guadalajara, Mexico. Over the course of a 90-minute speech Musk, always a dreamer, shared his biggest and most ambitious dream with the world—how to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species.

And what mighty ambitions they are. The Interplanetary Transport System he unveiled could carry 100 people at a time to Mars. Contrast that to the Apollo program, which carried just two astronauts at a time to the surface of the nearby Moon, and only for brief sojourns. Moreover, Musk’s rocket that would lift all of those people and propellant into orbit would be nearly four times as powerful as the mighty Saturn V booster. Musk envisions a self-sustaining Mars colony with at least a million residents by the end of the century.

Beyond this, what really stood out about Musk’s speech on Tuesday was the naked baring of his soul. Considering his mannerisms, passion, and the utter seriousness of his convictions, it felt at times like the man's entire life had led him to that particular stage. It took courage to make the speech, to propose the greatest space adventure of all time. His ideas, his architecture for getting it done—they’re all out there now for anyone to criticize, second guess, and doubt.

This Facebook-connectivity update appears to be rolling out to Oculus Rift users in waves as part of the headset PC software's 1.8 update. (credit: Reddit)

This week saw the latest Oculus Rift software runtime begin to roll out to PC users, and the 1.8 version includes one new feature in particular: official Facebook integration. The software update is rolling out in waves, so Oculus owners may not yet have this live on their PCs, but once it rolls out, users are told that "Oculus is better with Facebook friends" and are given the option of logging in to a Facebook account.

To confirm, this is wholly optional, and the service will still operate normally should users not opt in. And in some ways, this change brings Facebook up to speed with other major online gaming platforms such as Steam, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network, which all support Facebook-specific features like searching for friends and posting updates.

However, Oculus' tie-in to Facebook is different from the others in more aggressively tying FB to a gaming service, according to the Facebook-in-Oculus terms posted to the headset's official Reddit forum. For starters, should you log in to Facebook via the Oculus Rift's PC app, your username will change to your real name. If for any reason you'd rather your Oculus username continue to be your favorite gaming handle, whether for privacy's sake or just because you like the sound of it, you'll have to avoid the login.

Ars was among the first news outlets to report on discussions among astronomers about observations of an intriguing "signal" that may have originated from a distant, Sun-like star. We cautioned readers that, because the signal was measured at 11Ghz, there was a "significant chance" it was of terrestrial origin, likely due to some military activity.

Well, it apparently was. First, astronomers with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence downplayed the possibility of an alien civilization. "There are many other plausible explanations for this claimed transmission, including terrestrial interference," Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer with SETI, wrote.

Now the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences has concurred, releasing a statement on the detection of a radio signal at the RATAN-600 radio astronomy observatory in southern Russia. "Subsequent processing and analysis of the signal revealed its most probable terrestrial origin," the Russian scientists said. (Maybe it was really Steve Martin and his hair dryer?)

(credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is switching Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 to a cumulative update model similar to the one used by Windows 10. The company is moving away from the individual hotfix approach it has used thus far for those operating systems.

One of the major differences between Windows 7 and 8.1 on the one hand and Windows 10 on the other is what happens when you run Windows Update. Microsoft's two older operating systems usually need to fetch a handful of individual patches each month. If a system hasn't been patched for a few months, this can require dozens of individual fixes to be retrieved. In the case of a clean installation, that number can reach the hundreds.

Windows 10, on the other hand, has perhaps one or two updates released each month. A single cumulative update incorporates not just all of the newest security and reliability fixes, but all the older fixes from previous months, too. If a system isn't updated for a few months or has had its operating system freshly reinstalled, the scenario of having hundreds of individual fixes never occurs. Windows 10 just grabs the latest cumulative update and, with that one package, is more or less up-to-date.

It's better, we promise.

If you use Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 and want to upgrade to Windows 10 for free, there are just a few more hours left to grab your copy. The offer expires today, July 29. At the time of writing, less than 19 hours still remain.

If you're eligible, you should upgrade. In almost every regard, Windows 10 is a better operating system than Windows 7 or 8.1 (unless you use Media Center, in which case you're trapped on old operating systems forever). If you want to get the free upgrade but can't upgrade right now because of timing or compatibility concerns, your best option is to install Windows 10 onto an empty hard drive using your existing Windows 7 or 8.1 key. Activate that installation and magic will occur: your key will become Windows 10 "enabled," and you should be able to use it to perform the upgrade at a later date. Similar results can likely be achieved by installing into a virtual machine rather than an empty hard disk.

The cut-off doesn't apply to those who use assistive technology such as screen-readers; those Windows users will be able to upgrade to Windows 10 whenever they feel like it, though Microsoft apparently has yet to fully explain how this will work.

This should become a thing of the past. (credit: Microsoft)

Anyone who's installed Windows 7 any time in the last, oh, five years or so probably didn't enjoy the experience very much. Service Pack 1 for the operating system was released in 2011, meaning that a fresh install has five years of individual patches to download and install. Typically, this means multiple trips to Windows Update and multiple reboots in order to get the system fully up-to-date, and it is a process that is at best tedious, typically leading one to wonder why, at the very least, it cannot pull down all the updates at once and apply them with just a single reboot.

The answer to that particular question will, unfortunately, remain a mystery, but Microsoft did today announce a change that will greatly reduce the pain of this process. The company has published a "convenience rollup" for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (and Windows Server 2008 R2), which in a single package contains all the updates, both security and non-security, released since the Service Pack, up through April 2016. Installing the rollup will perform five years of patching in one shot.

In other words, it performs a very similar role to what Windows 7 Service Pack 2 would have done, if only Windows 7 Service Pack 2 were to exist. It's not quite the same as a Service Pack—it still requires Service Pack 1 to be installed, and the system will still report that it is running Service Pack 1—but for most intents and purposes, that won't matter. Microsoft will also support injecting this rollup into Windows 7 Service Pack 1 system images and install media.

(credit: aaditya sood)

Inmate Stephen Cavanaugh

A federal judge dismissed the suit (PDF) Tuesday brought by Stephen Cavanaugh, who is serving a 4- to 8-year term on assault and weapons charges at the Nebraska State Penitentiary. US District Judge John Gerrard ruled that "FSMism" isn't a religion like the ones protected under the Constitution.

"The Court finds that FSMism is not a 'religion' within the meaning of the relevant federal statutes and constitutional jurisprudence. It is, rather, a parody, intended to advance an argument about science, the evolution of life, and the place of religion in public education. Those are important issues, and FSMism contains a serious argument—but that does not mean that the trappings of the satire used to make that argument are entitled to protection as a 'religion,'" the judge ruled. (PDF)

It's bash, and it's on Windows. (credit: Microsoft)

The first Windows 10 Insider Preview build that includes support for native Linux bash on Windows is now out. This was some of the biggest news to come out of Build last week, as Microsoft works to make Windows even more attractive to developers.

The full install process is described on Microsoft's blog post, but the important part is that in order to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux, the system will have to be put into developer mode through the Settings app (instead of its default sideloading mode). Then the feature will need to be added from Windows Features, and finally the runtime environment will have to be fetched from the store. This process is a little convoluted, but it underscores that Microsoft is positioning the Linux support as a developer feature, not meant for production deployments yet.

The new build looks to be the most significant update since the release of the November Update last year. In addition to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, a bunch of other changes are included. Cortana is smarter, able to sync phone status and notifications between Windows and Android phones and Windows on the PC. She can also help you find your phone by making it ring when you've lost it, and if you look up directions on your PC, she can beam them to your phone for you.