Remember those researchers who spent years training AI tools to analyze the reviews drivers left on the smartphone apps where they pay for EV charging? There was one more unexpected finding. "Rideshare drivers who work for companies such as Uber are increasingly turning to electric vehicles to reduce fuel costs." That trend is boosting demand for conveniently located, publicly accessible EV chargers... "They are mostly relying on public chargers for their daily Uber needs, usually every day or every couple of days, which dramatically increases electric vehicle miles traveled," [climate fellow Omar Asensio told the Institute's blog], explaining that many drivers live in apartments that lack garages or space for a residential EV charger. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi considers the issue so pressing he urged U.S. policymakers to accelerate plans to improve the nation's EV charging infrastructure in a Fast Co. op-ed in January — during the World Economic Forum in Davos, when media messaging can influence policymakers. Independent Uber drivers, Khosrowshahi said, are converting to electric vehicles seven times faster than the general public and they tend to be disproportionately from low- and middle-income households that need access to public charging stations. "Charging infrastructure must be more equitable," Khosrowshahi wrote. "Many drivers don't have driveways or garages, so access to nearby overnight charging is essential. Yet our data shows us that Uber drivers often live in neighborhoods lacking this infrastructure. These 'charging deserts' hold countless people back from making the switch."

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"Russia has finally admitted that American astronauts did, in fact, land on the moon," reports Newsweek: Head of Russian Space Corporation Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, accepted the truth of the U.S. putting a man on the moon in an address to the State Duma, Intellinews has reported. "As for whether the Americans were on the Moon or not, I have one fact to share," he was reported to have said. "I was personally interested in this matter. At one time, they provided us with a portion of the lunar soil that the astronauts brought back during their expedition." Previous polling revealed that just under half of Russians believe America's 1969 moon landing was a government hoax. However, Borisov said that tests performed on the samples by the Russian Academy of Scientists confirmed their authenticity.

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"Many bike riders are hopeful about a world of robot drivers that never experience road rage or get distracted by their phones," reports the Washington Post. "But some resent being guinea pigs for driverless vehicles that veer into bike lanes, suddenly stop short and confuse cyclists trying to navigate around them. "In more than a dozen complaints submitted to the DMV, cyclists describe upsetting near misses and close calls... " Of the nearly 200 California DMV complaints analyzed by The Post, about 60 percent involved Cruise vehicles; the rest mostly involved Waymo. About a third describe erratic or reckless driving, while another third document near misses with pedestrians. The remainder involve reports of autonomous cars blocking traffic and disobeying road markings or traffic signals... Only 17 complaints involved bicyclists or bike lane disruptions. But interviews with cyclists suggest the DMV complaints represent a fraction of bikers' negative interactions with self-driving vehicles. And while most of the complaints describe relatively minor incidents, they raise questions about corporate boasts that the cars are safer than human drivers, said Christopher White, executive director of the San Francisco Bike Coalition... Robot cars could one day make roads safer, White said, "but we don't yet see the tech fully living up to the promise. ... The companies are talking about it as a much safer alternative to people driving. If that's the promise that they're making, then they have to live up to it...." Many bicycle safety advocates support the mission of autonomous vehicles, optimistic the technology will cut injuries and deaths. They are quick to point out the carnage associated with human-driven cars: There were 2,520 collisions in San Francisco involving at least one cyclist from 2017 to 2022, according to state data analyzed by local law firm Walkup, Melodia, Kelly & Schoenberger. In those crashes, 10 cyclists died and another 243 riders were severely injured, the law firm found. Nationally, there were 1,105 cyclists killed by drivers in 2022, according to NHTSA, the highest on record... Meanwhile, the fraction of complaints to the DMV related to bicycles demonstrates the shaky relationship between self-driving cars and cyclists. In April 2023, a Waymo edged into a crosswalk, confusing a cyclist and causing him to crash and fracture his elbow, according to the complaint filed by the cyclist. Then, in August — days after the state approved an expansion of these vehicles — a Cruise car allegedly made a right turn that cut off a cyclist. The rider attempted to stop but then flipped over their bike. "It clearly didn't react or see me!" the complaint said. Even if self-driving cars are proven to be safer than human drivers, they should still receive extra scrutiny and aren't the only way to make roads safer, several cyclists said. Thanks to Slashdot reader echo123 for sharing the article.

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Its FOSS writes: When it comes to Linux, we get to see some really cool, and sometimes quirky projects (read Hannah Montana Linux) that try to show off what's possible, and that's not a bad thing. One such quirky undertaking has recently surfaced, which sees a sophomore trying to one-up their friend, who had booted Linux off NFS. With their work, they have been able to run Arch Linux on Google Drive. Their ultimate idea included FUSE (which allows running file-system code in userspace). The developer's blog post explains that when Linux boots, "the kernel unpacks a temporary filesystem into RAM which has the tools to mount the real filesystem... it's very helpful! We can mount a FUSE filesystem in that step and boot normally.... " Thankfully, Dracut makes it easy enough to build a custom initramfs... I decide to build this on top of Arch Linux because it's relatively lightweight and I'm familiar with how it work." Doing testing in an Amazon S3 container, they built an EFI image — then spent days trying to enable networking... And the adventure continues. ("Would it be possible to manually switch the root without a specialized system call? What if I just chroot?") After they'd made a few more tweaks, "I sit there, in front of my computer, staring. It can't have been that easy, can it? Surely, this is a profane act, and the spirit of Dennis Ritchie ought't've stopped me, right? Nobody stopped me, so I kept going..." I build the unified EFI file, throw it on a USB drive under /BOOT/EFI, and stick it in my old server... This is my magnum opus. My Great Work. This is the mark I will leave on this planet long after I am gone: The Cloud Native Computer. Despite how silly this project is, there are a few less-silly uses I can think of, like booting Linux off of SSH, or perhaps booting Linux off of a Git repository and tracking every change in Git using gitfs. The possibilities are endless, despite the middling usefulness. If there is anything I know about technology, it's that moving everything to The Cloud is the current trend. As such, I am prepared to commercialize this for any company wishing to leave their unreliable hardware storage behind and move entirely to The Cloud. Please request a quote if you are interested in True Cloud Native Computing. Unfortunately, I don't know what to do next with this. Maybe I should install Nix?

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC: On 21 June, Barcelona mayor Jaume Collboni announced plans to ban short term rentals in the city starting in November 2028. The decision is designed to solve what Collboni described as "Barcelona's biggest problem" — the housing crisis that has seen residents and workers priced out of the market — by returning the 10,000 apartments currently listed as short-term rentals on Airbnb and other platforms into the housing market... It's all part of a wider theme: around the world. Airbnb — which dominates the short-term rental market with more than 50% of all online bookings — and others, including VRBO, Booking.com and Expedia.com, are being scrutinised at the same time as questions are being asked about who tourism is for, and where the balance lies between benefits for tourists and locals alike... Recent years have seen a backlash against the brand, which is blamed for pushing up housing prices and affecting locals who feel they have been forced to live next door to unregulated hotels... The question is: does banning or restricting short-term rentals actually reduce housing prices or affect housing stock? Harvard Business Review's study on the impact of the New York City ban, published earlier this year, concluded that in this case, short term rentals are not the biggest contributor to high rents, and that regulations, rather than bans, would offer better benefits to the city and locals alike. One clear result from the city's ban has been that hotel room rates have hiked to a record average of $300 per night. So why are tourism authorities and city councils doing it? Perhaps the real reason is that it's not just about the numbers, it's about how local people feel about tourism... Successful on paper or not, these bans send a signal to local people that politicians are listening to their concerns and will prioritise them over tourists. There is an alternative to outright bans, though. Many destinations, including Berlin, restrict owner-occupiers to a 90-day maximum rental period over a year, effectively allowing part-time hosts to continue to make a supplementary income while preventing professional hosts from buying up housing stock and turning it into full-time short-term rentals. The issue for all countries moving in this direction, including the UK, which proposes something similar, is about regulation. How do you do it and how much extra does it cost to do so?

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"China may be the world's second-largest economy," writes Fortune's news editor, "but when it comes to startup funding, the U.K. is punching above its weight." Startups in the U.K. raised $6.7 billion in funding during the first half of 2024, helping dethrone China and propelling the U.K. to second place globally for funds raised, according to a new report. Crucial to the U.K.'s success were a dozen funding rounds worth over $100 million each, including those of digital bank Monzo ($620 million), lender Abound ($862 million), and automated driving startup Wayve ($1.05 billion). While the overall U.K. figure was down 2% year on year, according to data from global market intelligence platform Tracxn, it remained more robust than that of China, whose funding sat at $6.1 billion in H1 2024, helping the U.K. move into the No. 2 spot globally. The win is a milestone for the U.K. tech sector, which has remained under pressure owing to a string of challenges, including Brexit, COVID-19, and the subsequent global economic slowdown. Only the U.S. saw startups raise more capital in H1, with a combined $54.8 billion raised across some 2,654 funding rounds in the first half of the year. The article's last line? "With the arrival of new U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, many will be hoping that the first Labour government in 14 years will continue to support the U.K.'s position as a critical player in the global tech landscape."

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Linux's vDSO (or virtual dynamic shared object) is "a small shared library that the kernel automatically maps into the address space of all user-space applications," according to its man page. "There are some system calls the kernel provides that user-space code ends up using frequently, to the point that such calls can dominate overall performance... due both to the frequency of the call as well as the context-switch overhead that results from exiting user space and entering the kernel." But Linus Torvalds had a lot to say about a proposed getrandom() upgrade, reports Phoronix: This getrandom() work in the vDSO has been through 20+ rounds of review over the past 2+ years, but... Torvalds took some time out of his U.S. Independence Day to argue the merits of the patches on the Linux kernel mailing list. Torvalds kicked things off by writing: Nobody has explained to me what has changed since your last vdso getrandom, and I'm not planning on pulling it unless that fundamental flaw is fixed. Why is this _so_ critical that it needs a vdso? Why isn't user space just doing it itself? What's so magical about this all? This all seems entirely pointless to me still, because it's optimizing something that nobody seems to care about, adding new VM infrastructure, new magic system calls, yadda yadda. I was very sceptical last time, and absolutely _nothing_ has changed. Not a peep on why it's now suddenly so hugely important again. We don't add stuff "just because we can". We need to have a damn good reason for it. And I still don't see the reason, and I haven't seen anybody even trying to explain the reason. And then he responded to himself, adding: In other words, I want to see actual *users* piping up and saying "this is a problem, here's my real load that spends 10% of time on getrandom(), and this fixes it". I'm not AT ALL interested in microbenchmarks or theoretical "if users need high-performance random numbers". I need a real actual live user that says "I can't just use rdrand and my own chacha mixing on top" and explains why having a SSE2 chachacha in kernel code exposed as a vdso is so critical, and a magical buffer maintained by the kernel." Torvalds also added in a third message: One final note: the reason I'm so negative about this all is that the random number subsystem has such an absolutely _horrendous_ history of two main conflicting issues: people wanting reasonable usable random numbers on one side, and then the people that discuss what the word "entropy" means on the other side. And honestly, I don't want the kernel stuck even *more* in the middle of that morass.... Torvalds made additional comments. ("This smells. It's BS...") Advocating for the change was WiredGuard developer Jason Donenfeld, and more communication happened (and continues to happen... 40 messages and counting). At one point the discussion evolved to Torvalds saying "Bah. I guess I'll have to walk through the patch series once again. I'm still not thrilled about it. But I'll give it another go..."

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As Amazon's stock hits a record high (rising 32% just this year), long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: GeekWire reports that Jeff Bezos keeps selling Amazon stock after announcing his move away from Washington state — and its 7% tax on capital gains of more than $262,000 from the sale of stocks and bonds — to Florida, which does not have a capital gains tax (like WA, FL also does not tax personal income). Taylor Soper writes, "Bezos saved more than $600 million by moving to Miami and avoiding Washington's capital gains tax, CNBC reported in February, based on his sale of 50 million shares [$8.5 billion] earlier this year. With the sale of 25 million additional shares [$5 billion], revealed this week in a regulatory filing, Bezos will likely have saved close to $1 billion in total so far. It's a giant chunk of change that would have otherwise gone to the state of Washington."

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Workers at delivery company Shipt "found that their paychecks had become...unpredictable," according to an article in IEEE Spectrum. "They were doing the same work they'd always done, yet their paychecks were often less than they expected. And they didn't know why...." The article notes that "Companies whose business models rely on gig workers have an interest in keeping their algorithms opaque." But "The workers showed that it's possible to fight back against the opaque authority of algorithms, creating transparency despite a corporation's wishes." On Facebook and Reddit, workers compared notes. Previously, they'd known what to expect from their pay because Shipt had a formula: It gave workers a base pay of $5 per delivery plus 7.5 percent of the total amount of the customer's order through the app. That formula allowed workers to look at order amounts and choose jobs that were worth their time. But Shipt had changed the payment rules without alerting workers. When the company finally issued a press release about the change, it revealed only that the new pay algorithm paid workers based on "effort," which included factors like the order amount, the estimated amount of time required for shopping, and the mileage driven. The company claimed this new approach was fairer to workers and that it better matched the pay to the labor required for an order. Many workers, however, just saw their paychecks dwindling. And since Shipt didn't release detailed information about the algorithm, it was essentially a black box that the workers couldn't see inside. The workers could have quietly accepted their fate, or sought employment elsewhere. Instead, they banded together, gathering data and forming partnerships with researchers and organizations to help them make sense of their pay data. I'm a data scientist; I was drawn into the campaign in the summer of 2020, and I proceeded to build an SMS-based tool — the Shopper Transparency Calculator [written in Python, using optical character recognition and Twilio, and running on a home server] — to collect and analyze the data. With the help of that tool, the organized workers and their supporters essentially audited the algorithm and found that it had given 40 percent of workers substantial pay cuts... This "information asymmetry" helps companies better control their workforces — they set the terms without divulging details, and workers' only choice is whether or not to accept those terms... There's no technical reason why these algorithms need to be black boxes; the real reason is to maintain the power structure... In a fairer world where workers have basic data rights and regulations require companies to disclose information about the AI systems they use in the workplace, this transparency would be available to workers by default. The tool's creator was attracted to the idea of helping a community "control and leverage their own data," and ultimately received more than 5,600 screenshots from over 200 workers. 40% were earning at least 10% less — and about 33% were earning less than their state's minimum wage. Interestingly, "Sharing data about their work was technically against the company's terms of service; astoundingly, workers — including gig workers who are classified as 'independent contractors' — often don't have rights to their own data... "[O]ur experiment served as an example for other gig workers who want to use data to organize, and it raised awareness about the downsides of algorithmic management. What's needed is wholesale changes to platforms' business models... The battles that gig workers are fighting are the leading front in the larger war for workplace rights, which will affect all of us. The time to define the terms of our relationship with algorithms is right now." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

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At one point on Friday the entire cryptocurrency market shed more than $170 billion in capitalization within 24 hours, CNBC reported (citing data from CoinGecko). "Cryptocurrencies plunged... as investors focused on the payout of nearly $9 billion to users of collapsed bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox." This dumping of coins onto the market is expected to lead to some significant selling action. The slump in crypto prices led to hefty liquidations in the derivatives markets, according to crypto data firm Coinglass, which suggests that 229,755 traders had their positions worth a combined $639.58 million liquidated [within 24 hours]. Of this sum, $540.46 million represented long trades — financial positions taken when an investor expects the price of an asset to appreciate over the long term. Also pressuring crypto markets, the German government on Thursday sold roughly 3,000 bitcoins — worth approximately $175 million as of today's prices — from a 50,000-bitcoin pile seized in connection with the movie piracy operation Movie2k, according to Arkham Intelligence.... Tom Lee, co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Monday that he still sees bitcoin hitting $150,000 despite the "overhang" from Mt. Gox's upcoming disbursement of tokens to creditors. Wired focuses on how "After a 10-Year Wait, Mt. Gox Bitcoin Is Finally Being Returned": In a highly atypical turn of events, Mt. Gox customers actually stand to profit financially from their involvement in the bankruptcy. Because only a limited amount of bitcoin was recovered, customers will receive only roughly 15 percent of the bitcoin they held on the exchange. However, the hundredfold increase in price in the intervening period means the dollar-value of the coins will far exceed the worth of their original pile.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from NPR: A teenage computer whiz who used the early-aughts internet to spread awareness of the Catholic faith will become the church's first millennial saint. Carlo Acutis, who died of leukemia at age 15 in 2006, is already referred to as "God's influencer" and the "patron saint of the internet" for his work cataloging Eucharistic miracles around the world — and soon it will be official. Pope Francis and a group of cardinals approved Acutis for canonization at a meeting at the Vatican on Monday, Vatican News announced. It says he will likely be proclaimed a saint at some point in 2025, during the church's jubilee year. Acutis was a devout Catholic who taught himself programming from an early age and created websites with a spiritual focus, including his widely praised database of miracles. He is credited with helping homeless people and defending victims of bullying during his lifetime, and having a hand in two healing miracles after his death — the requisite number for all Catholic saints. Monday's approval clears the final hurdle in a multiyear process, which began in 2013 when the pope approved the cause for his beatification and canonization and named him "a Servant of God...." Acutis also loved playing video games — CNN cited Halo, Super Mario and Pokémon among his favorites — though limited himself to one hour a week.

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"After sixteen years since the introduction of Python 3, the Fedora project announces that Python 2.7, the last of the Python 2 series, will be retired," according to long-time Slashdot reader slack_justyb. From the announcement on the Fedora changes page: The python2.7 package will be retired without replacement from Fedora Linux 41. There will be no Python 2 in Fedora 41+ other than PyPy. Packages requiring python2.7 on runtime or buildtime will have to deal with the retirement or be retired as well. "This also comes with the announcement that GIMP 3 will be coming to Fedora 41 to remove any last Python 2 dependencies," adds slack_justyb. GIMP 2 was originally released on March 23, 2004. GIMP will be updated to GIMP 3 with Python 3 support. Python 2 dependencies of GIMP will be retired. Python 2's end of life was originally 2015, but was extended to 2020. The Python maintainers close with this: The Python maintainers will no longer regularly backport security fixes to Python 2.7 in RHEL, due to the the end of maintenance of RHEL 7 and the retirement of the Python 2.7 application stream in RHEL 8. We provided this obsolete package for 5 years beyond its retirement date and will continue to provide it until Fedora 40 goes end of life. Enough has been enough.

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Harvard Business School has an "Institute for Business in Global Society" that explores the societal impacts of business. And they've recently published some new AI-powered research about EV charging infrastructure, according to the Institute's blog, conducted by climate fellow Omar Asensio. "Asensio and his team, supported by Microsoft and National Science Foundation awards, spent years building models and training AI tools to extract insights and make predictions," using the reviews drivers left (in more than 72 languages) on the smartphone apps drivers use to pay for charging. And ultimately this research identified "a significant obstacle to increasing electric vehicle (EV) sales and decreasing carbon emissions in the United States: owners' deep frustration with the state of charging infrastructure, including unreliability, erratic pricing, and lack of charging locations..." [C]harging stations in the U.S. have an average reliability score of only 78%, meaning that about one in five don't work. They are, on average, less reliable than regular gas stations, Asensio said. "Imagine if you go to a traditional gas station and two out of 10 times the pumps are out of order," he said. "Consumers would revolt...." EV drivers often find broken equipment, making charging unreliable at best and simply not as easy as the old way of topping off a tank of gas. The reason? "No one's maintaining these stations," Asensio said. One problem? Another blog post by the Institute notes that America's approach to public charging has differed sharply from those in other countries: In Europe and Asia, governments started making major investments in public charging infrastructure years ago. In America, the initial thinking was that private companies would fill the public's need by spending money to install charging stations at hotels, shopping malls and other public venues. But that decentralized approach failed to meet demand and the Biden administration is now investing heavily to grow the charging network and facilitate EV sales... "No single market actor has sufficient incentive to build out a national charging network at a pace that meets our climate goals," the report declared. Citing research and the experience of other countries, it noted that "policies that increase access to charging stations may be among the best policies to increase EV sales." But the U.S. is far behind other countries. Thanks to Slashdot reader NoWayNoShapeNoForm for sharing the article.

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In Communications of the ACM,/em>, long-time FreeBSD contributor Poul-Henning Kamp mocks the idea that the free and open-source software has "come apart" and "will end in tears and regret." Economists and others focused on money — like my bank — have had a lot of trouble figuring out the free and open source software (FOSS) phenomenon, and eventually they seem to have reached the conclusion that it just makes no sense. So, they go with the flow. Recently, very serious people in the FOSS movement have started to write long and thoughtful opinion pieces about how it has all come apart and will end in tears and regret. Allow me to disagree... What follows is a humorous history of how the Open Source movement bested a series of ill-conceived marketing failures starting after the "utterly bad" 1980s when IBM had an "unimaginably huge monopoly" — and an era of vendor lock-in from companies trying to be the next IBM: Out of that utter market failure came Minix, (Net/Free/Open)BSD, and Linux, at a median year of approximately 1991. I can absolutely guarantee that if we had been able to buy a reasonably priced and solid Unix for our 32-bit PCs — no strings attached — nobody would be running FreeBSD or Linux today, except possibly as an obscure hobby. Bill Gates would also have had a lot less of our money... The essay moves on to when "that dot-com thing happened, fueled by the availability of FOSS operating systems, which did a much better job than any operating system you could buy — not just for the price, but in absolute terms of performance on any given piece of hardware. Thus, out of utter market failure, the FOSS movement was born." And ultimately, the essay ends with our present day, and the phenomenon of companies that "make a business out of FOSS or derivatives thereof..." The "F" in FOSS was never silent. In retrospect, it seems clear that open source was not so much the goal itself as a means to an end, which is freedom: freedom to fix broken things, freedom from people who thought they could clutch the source code tightly and wield our ignorance of it as a weapon to force us all to pay for and run Windows Vista. But the FOSS movement has won what it wanted, and no matter how much oldsters dream about their glorious days as young revolutionaries, it is not coming back; the frustrations and anger of IT in 2024 are entirely different from those of 1991. One very big difference is that more people have realized that source code is a liability rather than an asset. For some, that realization came creeping along the path from young teenage FOSS activists in the late 1990s to CIOs of BigCorp today. For most of us, I expect, it was the increasingly crushing workload of maintaining legacy code bases...

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Slashdot reader joshuark shared this report from Windows Central Microsoft may have opened a can of worms with recent comments made by the tech giant's CEO of AI Mustafa Suleyman. The CEO spoke with CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Aspen Ideas Festival earlier this week. In his remarks, Suleyman claimed that all content shared on the web is available to be used for AI training unless a content producer says otherwise specifically. The whole discussion was interesting — but this particular question was very direct. CNBC's interviewer specifically said, "There are a number of authors here... and a number of journalists as well. And it appears that a lot of the information that has been trained on over the years has come from the web — and some of it's the open web, and some of it's not, and we've heard stories about how OpenAI was turning YouTube videos into transcripts and then training on the transcripts." The question becomes "Who is supposed to own the IP, who is supposed to get value from the IP, and whether, to put it in very blunt terms, whether the AI companies have effectively stolen the world's IP." Suleyman begins his answer — at the 14:40 mark — with "Yeah, I think — look, it's a very fair argument." SULEYMAN: "I think that with respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That's been the understanding. "There's a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, 'Do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.' That's a gray area and I think that's going to work its way through the courts." Q: And what does that mean, when you say 'It's a gray area'? SULEYMAN: "Well, if — so far, some people have taken that information... but that's going to get litigated, and I think that's rightly so... "You know, look, the economics of information are about to radically change, because we're going to reduce the cost of production of knowledge to zero marginal cost. And this is just a very difficult thing for people to intuit — but in 15 or 20 years time, we will be producing new scientific cultural knowledge at almost zero marginal cost. It will be widely open sourced and available to everybody. And I think that is going to be, you know, a true inflection point in the history of our species. Because what are we, collectively, as an organism of humans, other than an intellectual production engine. We produce knowledge. Our science makes us better. And so what we really want in the world, in my opinion, are new engines that can turbocharge discovery and invention."

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Monday Boeing announced plans to acquire its key supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, for $4.7 billion, according to the Associated Press — "a move that it says will improve plane quality and safety amid increasing scrutiny by Congress, airlines and the Department of Justice. Boeing previously owned Spirit, and the purchase would reverse a longtime Boeing strategy of outsourcing key work on its passenger planes." But meanwhile, an anonymous reader shared this report from Newsweek: More than a hundred Boeing whistleblowers have contacted the U.S. aviation watchdog since the start of the year, Newsweek can reveal. Official figures show that the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) whistleblowing hotline has seen a huge surge of calls from workers concerned about safety problems. Since January the watchdog saw a total of 126 reports, via various channels, from workers concerned about safety problems. In 2023, there were just 11.... After a visit from FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker to a Boeing factory earlier in the year, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun agreed to share details of the hotline with all Boeing employees. The FAA told Newsweek that the number of Boeing employees coming forward was a "sign of a healthy culture".... Newsweek also spoke to Jon Holden, president of the 751 District for the International Association of Machinists, Boeing's largest union which represents more than 32,000 aerospace workers. Holden said that numerous whistleblowers had complained to the FAA over Boeing's attempt to cut staff and reduce inspections in an effort to "speed up the rate" at which planes went out the door... Holden's union is currently in contract negotiations with Boeing, and is attempting to secure a 40% pay rise alongside a 50-year guarantee of work security for its members. CNN also reports on new allegations Wednesday from a former Boeing quality-control manager: that "for years workers at its 787 Dreamliner factory in Everett, Washington, routinely took parts that were deemed unsuitable to fly out of an internal scrap yard and put them back on factory assembly lines." In his first network TV interview, Merle Meyers, a 30-year veteran of Boeing, described to CNN what he says was an elaborate off-the-books practice that Boeing managers at the Everett factory used to meet production deadlines, including taking damaged and improper parts from the company's scrapyard, storehouses and loading docks... Meyers' claims that lapses he witnessed were intentional, organized efforts designed to thwart quality control processes in an effort to keep up with demanding production schedules. Beginning in the early 2000s, Meyers says that for more than a decade, he estimates that about 50,000 parts "escaped" quality control and were used to build aircraft. Those parts include everything from small items like screws to more complex assemblies like wing flaps. A single Boeing 787 Dreamliner, for example, has approximately 2.3 million parts... Based on conversations Meyers says he had with current Boeing workers in the time since he left the company, he believes that while employees no longer remove parts from the scrapyard, the practice of using other unapproved parts in assembly lines continues. "Now they're back to taking parts of body sections — everything — right when it arrives at the Everett site, bypassing quality, going right to the airplane," Meyers said. Company emails going back years show that Meyers repeatedly flagged the issue to Boeing's corporate investigations team, pointing out what he says were blatant violations of Boeing's safety rules. But investigators routinely failed to enforce those rules, Meyers says, even ignoring "eye witness observations and the hard work done to ensure the safety of future passengers and crew," he wrote in an internal 2022 email provided to CNN.

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IEEE Spectrum (the IEEE's official publication) asks the question. "How does an AI code generator compare to a human programmer?" A study published in the June issue of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering evaluated the code produced by OpenAI's ChatGPT in terms of functionality, complexity and security. The results show that ChatGPT has an extremely broad range of success when it comes to producing functional code — with a success rate ranging from anywhere as poor as 0.66 percent and as good as 89 percent — depending on the difficulty of the task, the programming language, and a number of other factors. While in some cases the AI generator could produce better code than humans, the analysis also reveals some security concerns with AI-generated code. The study tested GPT-3.5 on 728 coding problems from the LeetCode testing platform — and in five programming languages: C, C++, Java, JavaScript, and Python. The results? Overall, ChatGPT was fairly good at solving problems in the different coding languages — but especially when attempting to solve coding problems that existed on LeetCode before 2021. For instance, it was able to produce functional code for easy, medium, and hard problems with success rates of about 89, 71, and 40 percent, respectively. "However, when it comes to the algorithm problems after 2021, ChatGPT's ability to generate functionally correct code is affected. It sometimes fails to understand the meaning of questions, even for easy level problems," said Yutian Tang, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow. For example, ChatGPT's ability to produce functional code for "easy" coding problems dropped from 89 percent to 52 percent after 2021. And its ability to generate functional code for "hard" problems dropped from 40 percent to 0.66 percent after this time as well... The researchers also explored the ability of ChatGPT to fix its own coding errors after receiving feedback from LeetCode. They randomly selected 50 coding scenarios where ChatGPT initially generated incorrect coding, either because it didn't understand the content or problem at hand. While ChatGPT was good at fixing compiling errors, it generally was not good at correcting its own mistakes... The researchers also found that ChatGPT-generated code did have a fair amount of vulnerabilities, such as a missing null test, but many of these were easily fixable. "Interestingly, ChatGPT is able to generate code with smaller runtime and memory overheads than at least 50 percent of human solutions to the same LeetCode problems..."

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They lived 378 days in a "mock Mars habitat" in Houston, reports Engadget. But today the four volunteers for NASA's yearlong simulation will finally emerge from their 1,700-square-foot habitat at the Johnson Space Center that was 3D-printed from materials that could be created with Martian soil. And you can watch the "welcome home" ceremony's livestream starting at 5 p.m. EST on NASA TV (also embedded in Engadget's story). More det ails from NASA: For more than a year, the crew simulated Mars mission operations, including "Marswalks," grew and harvested several vegetables to supplement their shelf-stable food, maintained their equipment and habitat, and operated under additional stressors a Mars crew will experience, including communication delays with Earth, resource limitations, and isolation. One of the mission's crew members told the Houston Chronicle they were "very excited to go back to 'Earth,' but of course there is a bittersweet aspect to it just like any time you reach the completion of something that has dominated one's life for several years." Various crew members left behind their children or long-term partner for this once-in-a-lifetime experience, according to an earlier article, which also notes that NASA is paying the participants $10 per hour "for all waking hours, up to 16 hours per day. That's as much as $60,480 for the 378-day mission." Engadget points out there are already plans for two more one-year "missions" — with the second one expected to begin next spring... I'm curious. Would any Slashdot readers be willing to spend a year in a mock Mars habitat?

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New York City announced a "major citywide initiative" to increase "math achievement" among students, according to the mayor's office. 93 middle schools and 420 high schools will implement an "Illustrative Math" curriculum (from an education nonprofit founded in 2011) combined with intensive teacher coaching, starting this fall. "The goal is to ensure that all New York City students develop math skills," according to the NYC Solves web site (with the mayor's office noting "years of stagnant math scores.") Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The NYC Public Schools further explained, "As part of the NYC Solves initiative, all high schools will use Illustrative Mathematics and districts will choose a comprehensive, evidence-based curricula for middle school math instruction from an approved list. Each curriculum has been reviewed and recommended by EdReports, a nationally recognized nonprofit organization." The About page for Illustrative Mathematics (IM) lists The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a Philanthropic Supporter [as well as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation], and lists two Gates Foundation Directors as Board members... A search of Gates Foundation records for "Illustrative Mathematics" turns up $25 million in committed grants since 2012, including a $13.9 million grant to Illustrated Mathematics in Nov. 2022 ("To support the implementation of high-quality instructional materials and practices for improving students' math experience and outcomes") and a $425,000 grant just last month to Educators for Excellence ("To engage teacher feedback on the implementation of Illustrative Mathematics curriculum and help middle school teachers learn about the potential for math high-quality instructional materials and professional learning in New York City"). EdReports, which vouched for the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum (according to New York's Education Department), has received $10+ million in committed Gates Foundation grants. The Gates Foundation is also a very generous backer of NYC's Fund for Public Schools, with grants that included $4,276,973 in October 2023 "to support the implementation of high-quality instructional materials and practices for improving students' math experience and outcomes." Chalkbeat reported in 2018 on a new focus on high school curriculum by the Gates Foundation ("an area where we feel like we've underinvested," said Bill Gates). The Foundation made math education its top K-12 priority in Oct. 2022 with a $1.1 billion investment. Also note this May 2023 blog post from $14+ million Gates Foundation grantee Educators for Excellence, a New York City nonprofit. The blog post touts the key role the nonprofit had played in a year-long advocacy effort that ultimately "secured a major win" ending the city's curricula "free-for-all" and announced "a standardized algebra curriculum from Illustrative Mathematics will also be piloted at 150 high schools." As the NY Times reported back in 2011, behind "grass-roots" school advocacy, there's Bill Gates!

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Windows Recall was "delayed" over concerns that storing unencrypted recordings of users' activity was a security risk. But now Slashdot reader storagedude writes: The latest version of Microsoft's planned Windows Recall feature still contains data privacy and security vulnerabilities, according to a report by the Cyber Express. Security researcher Kevin Beaumont — whose work started the backlash that resulted in Recall getting delayed last month — said the most recent preview version is still hackable by Alex Hagenah's "TotalRecall" method "with the smallest of tweaks." The Windows screen recording feature could as yet be refined to fix security concerns, but some have spotted it recently in some versions of the Windows 11 24H2 release preview that will be officially released in the fall. Cyber Express (the blog of threat intelligence vendor Cyble Inc) got this official response: Asked for comment on Beaumont's findings, a Microsoft spokesperson said the company "has not officially released Recall," and referred to the updated blog post that announced the delay, which said: "Recall will now shift from a preview experience broadly available for Copilot+ PCs on June 18, 2024, to a preview available first in the Windows Insider Program (WIP) in the coming weeks." "Beyond that, Microsoft has nothing more to share," the spokesperson added. Also this week, the blog Android Authority wrote that Google is planning to introduce its own "Google AI" features to Pixel 9 smartphones. They include the ability to enhance screenshots, an "Add Me" tool for group photos — and also "a feature resembling Microsoft's controversial Recall" dubbed "Pixel Screenshots." Google's take on the feature is different and more privacy-focused: instead of automatically capturing everything you're doing, it will only work on screenshots you take yourself. When you do that, the app will add a bit of extra metadata to it, like app names, web links, etc. After that, it will be processed by a local AI, presumably the new multimodal version of Gemini Nano, which will let you search for specific screenshots just by their contents, as well as ask a bot questions about them. My take on the feature is that it's definitely a better implementation of the idea than what Microsoft created.. [B]oth of the apps ultimately serve a similar purpose and Google's implementation doesn't easily leak sensitive information... It's worth mentioning Motorola is also working on its own version of Recall — not much is known at the moment, but it seems it will be similar to Google's implementation, with no automatic saving of everything on the screen. The Verge describes the Pixel 9's Google AI as "like Microsoft Recall but a little less creepy."

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"Images captured from space show the growth of Cuba's electronic eavesdropping stations," reported the Wall Street Journal this week, citing a new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. But they added that the stations "are believed to be linked to China," including previously-unreported construction about 70 miles from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. (The Journal had previously reported China and Cuba were "negotiating closer defense and intelligence ties, including establishing a new joint military training facility on the island and an eavesdropping facility.") At the time, the Journal reported that Cuba and China were already jointly operating eavesdropping stations on the island, according to U.S. officials, who didn't disclose their locations. It couldn't be determined which, if any, of those are included in the sites covered by the CSIS report. The concern about the stations, former officials and analysts say, is that China is using Cuba's geographical proximity to the southeastern U.S. to scoop up sensitive electronic communications from American military bases, space-launch facilities, and military and commercial shipping. Chinese facilities on the island "could also bolster China's use of telecommunications networks to spy on U.S. citizens," said Leland Lazarus, an expert on China-Latin America relations at Florida International University... Authors of the CSIS report, after analyzing years' worth of satellite imagery, found that Cuba has significantly upgraded and expanded its electronic spying facilities in recent years and pinpointed four sites — at Bejucal, El Salao, Wajay and Calabazar... "These are active locations with an evolving mission set," said Matthew Funaiole, a senior follow at CSIS and the report's chief author. The CSIS web site shows some of the satellite images. "Pinpointing the specific targets of these assets is nearly impossible," they add — but since Cuba has no space program, "the types of space-tracking capabilities observed are likely intended to monitor the activities of other nations (like the United States) with a presence in orbit." While China's own satellites could also benefit from a North America-based groundstation for communications, the Cuban facilities "would also provide the ability to monitor radio traffic and potentially intercept data delivered by U.S. satellites as they pass over highly sensitive military sites across the southern United States." The think tank points out that one possibly-installed system would be within range to monitor rocket launches from Cape Canaveral and NASA's Kennedy Space Center. "Studying these launches — particularly those of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy reusable first-stage booster rocket systems — is likely of keen interest to China as it attempts to catch up to U.S. leadership in space launch technology."

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"For two years, many unprofitable tech startups have cut costs, sold themselves or gone out of business," reports the New York Times. "But the ones focused on artificial intelligence have been thriving." Now, the AI boom that started in late 2022, has become the strongest counterpoint to the broader startup downturn. Investors poured $27.1 billion into AI startups in the United States from April to June, accounting for nearly half of all U.S. startup funding in that period, according to PitchBook, which tracks startups. In total, U.S. startups raised $56 billion, up 57% from a year earlier and the highest three-month haul in two years. AI companies are attracting huge rounds of funding reminiscent of 2021, when low interest rates pushed investors away from taking risks on tech investments... The startup downturn began in early 2022 as many money-losing companies struggled to grow as quickly as they did in the pandemic. Rising interest rates also pushed investors to chase less risky investments. To make up for dwindling funding, startups slashed staff and scaled back their ambitions. Then in late 2022, OpenAI, a San Francisco AI lab, kicked off a new boom with the release of its ChatGPT chatbot. Excitement around generative AI technology, which can produce text, images and videos, set off a frenzy of startup creation and funding. "Sam Altman canceled the recession," joked Siqi Chen, founder of the startup Runway Financial, referring to OpenAI's chief executive. Chen said his company, which makes finance software, was growing faster than it otherwise would have because "AI can do the job of 1.5 people...." An analysis of 125 AI startups by Kruze Consulting, an accounting and tax advisory firm, showed that the companies spent an average of 22% of their expenses on computing costs in the first three months of the year — more than double the 10% spent by non-AI software companies in the same period. "No wonder VCs are throwing money into these companies," said Healy Jones, Kruze's vice president of financial strategy. While AI startups are growing faster than other startups, he said, "they clearly need the money." Startups receiving funding include CoreWeave ($1.1 billion), ScaleAI ($1 billion), and the Elon Musk-founded xAI ($6 billion), according to the article. "For investors who back fast-growing startups, there is little downside to being wrong about the next big thing, but there is enormous upside in being right. AI's potential has generated deafening hype, with prominent investors and executives predicting that the market for AI will be bigger than the markets for the smartphone, the personal computer, social media and the internet."

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General Motors will pay nearly $146 million in penalties to the U.S. government, reports the Associated Press, "because 5.9 million of its older vehicles do not comply with emissions and fuel economy standards." The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a statement Wednesday that certain GM vehicles from the 2012 through 2018 model years did not comply with federal fuel economy requirements. The penalty comes after the Environmental Protection Agency said its testing showed the GM pickup trucks and SUVs emit over 10% more carbon dioxide on average than GM's initial compliance testing claimed. The EPA says the vehicles will remain on the road and cannot be repaired. The GM vehicles on average consume at least 10% more fuel than the window sticker numbers say, but the company won't be required to reduce the miles per gallon on the stickers, the EPA said... GM said in a statement that it complied with all regulations in pollution and mileage certification of its vehicles. The company said it is not admitting to any wrongdoing nor that it failed to comply with the Clean Air Act... The enforcement action involves about 4.6 million full-size pickups and SUVs and about 1.3 million midsize SUVs, the EPA said. The affected models include the Chevy Tahoe, Cadillac Escalade and Chevy Silverado. About 40 variations of GM vehicles are covered. GM will be forced to give up credits used to ensure that manufacturers' greenhouse gas emissions are below the fleet standard for emissions that applies for that model year, the EPA said. In a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, GM said it expects the total cost to resolve the matter will be $490 million. Because GM agreed to address the excess emissions, EPA said it was not necessary to make a formal determination regarding the reasons for the excess pollution. According to the article, David Cooke, senior vehicles analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, "said it's possible that GM owners could sue the company because they are getting lower gas mileage than advertised." The article also notes that in 2014, Hyundai and Kia "entered into a settlement in which they had to pay a $100 million civil penalty to end a two year investigation into overstated gas mileage on window stickers of 1.2 million vehicles."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Business Insider: It's a political tale as old as time: put up a campaign poster in your yard, and thieves come to snatch it. But according to The Wall Street Journal, those fed up with front lawn looting are embracing a modern solution. Apple's geo-tracking AirTag devices are helping owners find their signs — and sometimes, even the people who stole them. The practice has already led to charges. In one example cited by the outlet, Florida politician John Dittmore decided to hide the coin-sized gadget on one of his posters after waking up to a number of thefts in May... [Two teenagers were charged with criminal mischief and the theft of nine signs.] In other cited cases, stolen signs don't end up with teens, but in the homes of electoral opponents. After Chris Torre became the victim of poster snatching, AirTags led him to the residence of Renee Rountree, the Journal said. Both were running for a seat on the Isle of Wight County Board of Supervisors in Virginia. Her son-in-law was charged with a misdemeanor for stealing the property, while Rountree faced a misdemeanor for receiving stolen goods. In a December trial, she noted plans to return the signs. Rountree has since been ordered to 250 hours of community service. "I would like to think that this will have a huge deterrent effect," the trial's judge said in the court's transcript, quoted by WSJ.

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"After approximately seven years in development, the Eclipse Foundation's Theia IDE project is now generally available," writes ADT magazine, "emerging from beta to challenge Microsoft's similar Visual Studio Code (VS Code) editor." The Eclipse Theia IDE is part of the Eclipse Cloud DevTools ecosystem. The Eclipse Foundation calls it "a true open-source alternative to VS Code," which was built on open source but includes proprietary elements, such as default telemetry, which collects usage data... Theia was built on the same Monaco editor that powers VS Code, and it supports the same Language Server Protocol (LSP) and Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) that provide IntelliSense code completions, error checking and other features. The Theia IDE also supports the same extensions as VS Code (via the Open VSX Registry instead of Microsoft's Visual Studio Code Marketplace), which are typically written in TypeScript and JavaScript. There are many, many more extensions available for VS Code in Microsoft's marketplace, while "Extensions for VS Code Compatible Editors" in the Open VSX Registry number 3,784 at the time of this writing... The Eclipse Foundation emphasized another difference between its Theia IDE and VS Code: the surrounding ecosystem/community. "At the core of Theia IDE is its vibrant open source community hosted by the Eclipse Foundation," the organization said in a news release. "This ensures freedom for commercial use without proprietary constraints and fosters innovation and reliability through contributions from companies such as Ericsson, EclipseSource, STMicroelectronics, TypeFox, and more. The community-driven model encourages participation and adaptation according to user needs and feedback." Indeed, the list of contributors to and adopters of the platform is extensive, also featuring Broadcom, Arm, IBM, Red Hat, SAP, Samsung, Google, Gitpod, Huawei and many others. The It's FOSS blog has some screenshots and a detailed rundown. ADT magazine stresses that there's also an entirely distinct (but related) project called the Eclipse Theia Platform (not IDE) which differs from VS Code by allowing developers "to create desktop and cloud IDEs using a single, open-source technology stack" [that can be used in open-source initiatives]. The Eclipse Theia platform "allows developers to customize every aspect of the IDE without forking or patching the code... fully tailored for the needs of internal company projects or for commercial resale as a branded product."

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In 1994, college student Jim Hall created FreeDOS (in response to Microsoft's plan to gradually phase out MS-DOS). After celebrating its 30th anniversary last week, Hill wrote a new article Saturday for OpenSource.net: "What I've learned about Open Source community over 30 years." Lessons include "every Open Source project needs a website," but also "consider other ways to raise awareness about your Open Source software project." ("In the FreeDOS Project, we've found that posting videos to our YouTube channel is an excellent way to help people learn about FreeDOS... The more information you can share about your Open Source project, the more people will find it familiar and want to try it out.") But the larger lesson is that "Open Source projects must be grounded in community." Without open doors for new ideas and ongoing development, even the most well-intentioned project becomes a stagnant echo chamber... Maintain open lines of communication... This can take many forms, including an email list, discussion board, or some other discussion forum. Other forums where people can ask more general "Help me" questions are okay but try to keep all discussions about project development on your official discussion channel. The last of its seven points stresses that "An Open Source project isn't really Open Source without source code that everyone can download, study, use, modify and share" (urging careful selection for your project's licensing). But the first point emphasizes that "It's more than just code," and Hall ends his article by attributing FreeDOS's three-decade run to "the great developers and users in our community." In celebrating FreeDOS, we are celebrating everyone who has created programs, fixed bugs, added features, translated messages, written documentation, shared articles, or contributed in some other way to the FreeDOS Project... Here's looking forward to more years to come! Jim Hall is also Slashdot reader #2,985, and back in 2000 he answered questions from Slashdot's readers — just six years after starting the project. "Jim isn't rich or famous," wrote RobLimo, "just an old-fashioned open source contributor who helped start a humble but useful project back in 1994 and still works on it as much as he can." As the years piled up, Slashdot ran posts celebrating FreeDOS's 10th, 15th, and 20th anniversary. And then for FreeDOS's 25th, Hall returned to Slashdot to answer more questions from Slashdot readers...

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The Los Angeles Times reports that "multiple projects seeking to remove carbon dioxide from the air have been launched across Los Angeles County: When completed, Project Monarch and its wastewater component, Pure Water Antelope Valley, will purify up to 4.5 million gallons of water each day and capture 25,000 tons of atmospheric CO2 each year. (The typical gasoline-powered automobile spews 4.6 tons of carbon each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency).... But the Palmdale project isn't the only new carbon-capture development in L.A. County. On Friday, officials from CarbonCapture Inc. gathered in Long Beach to introduce the first commercial-scale U.S. direct air capture, or DAC, system designed for mass production. The unit, which resembles a shipping container, can remove more than 500 tons of atmospheric CO2 per year... The L.A.-based company also announced that it will mass-produce up to 4,000 of its DAC modules annually at a new facility in Mesa, Arizona. It joins similar efforts from L.A.-based Captura, which is working to remove CO2 from the upper ocean; L.A.-based Avnos, which produces water while capturing carbon; and L.A.-based Equatic, which is working to remove atmospheric CO2 using the ocean... [Equatic's] San Pedro facility pumps seawater through a series of electric plates that separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen as well as acidic and alkaline streams of liquid. The alkaline, or base, stream is exposed to the atmosphere, where it mineralizes CO2 into carbonates that are then dissolved and discharged back into the ocean for permanent storage, operators say Additionally, the hydrogen produced by the process is carbon-negative, making it a source of renewable energy that can be used to fuel the CO2 removal process or sold to other users, said Edward Sanders, chief operating officer at Equatic. Equatic announced this month that it will partner with a Canadian carbon removal project developer, Deep Sky, to build North America's first commercial-scale ocean-based CO2 removal plant in Quebec, following the success of its effort in Los Angeles as well as another facility in Singapore. While the San Pedro facility can capture about 40 tons of CO2 per year, the Quebec facility will capture about 100,000 tons per year, Sanders said. Meanwhile, two new projects by direct air capture company Heirloom were announced this week in Louisiana. Those projects are "expected to remove hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide from the air per year," according to the Associated Press, "and store it deep underground... part of "a slew of carbon removal and storage projects that have been announced in Louisiana." Heirloom estimates that they will eventually remove 320,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year... The company uses limestone, a natural absorbent, to extract carbon dioxide from the air. Heirloom's technology reduces the time it takes to absorb carbon dioxide in nature from years to just three days, according to the company's press release. The carbon dioxide is then removed from the limestone material and stored permanently underground. In May America's Energy department also announced $3.5 billion in funding for its carbon-capture program — four large-scale, regional direct air capture hubs "that each comprise a network of carbon dioxide removal projects..." The hubs will have the capacity to capture and then permanently store at least one million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually, either from a single unit or from multiple interconnected units. And Shell Canada has a pair of carbon capture projects in Alberta it expects to have operational toward the end of 2028, according to the CBC: The Polaris project is designed to capture about 650,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually from the Scotford complex. That works out to approximately 40 per cent of Scotford's direct CO2 emissions from the refinery and 22 per cent of its emissions from the chemicals complex.

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game of Asteroids An anonymous reader shared this report from The Hill: An asteroid the size of a football stadium threaded the needle between Earth and the moon Saturday morning — the second of two astronomical near misses in three days. Near miss, in this case, is a relative term: Saturday's asteroid, 2024 MK, came within 180,000 miles of Earth. On Thursday, meanwhile, asteroid 2011 UL21 flew within 4 million miles. But the Saturday passage of 2024 MK — which scientists discovered only two weeks ago — coincides with a sobering reminder of threats from space. Sunday is Asteroid Day, the anniversary of the 1908 explosion of a rock from space above a Russian town — the sort of danger that, astronomers warn, is always lurking as the Earth hurtles through space... In 2013, for instance, an asteroid about 62 feet across that broke apart nearly 20 miles above Siberia released 30 times as much energy as the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima. While most of the impact energy was absorbed by the atmosphere, the detonation triggered a shock wave that blew out windows and injured more than a thousand people. The article points out that if Saturday's asteroid had hit earth, the impact would have "the equivalent impact energy in the hundreds of megaton approaching a gigaton," Peter Brown of Canada's Western University told the Canadian Broadcasting Service. (For comparison, most hydrogen bombs are in the 50-megaton range.) Brown said "It's the sort of thing that if it hit the east coast of the U.S., you would have catastrophic effects over most of the eastern seaboard. But it's not big enough to affect the whole world." Meanwhile, the article adds that last Thursday's asteroid — "while it was comfortably far out in space" — was the size of Mt. Everest. "At 1.5 miles in diameter, that asteroid was about a quarter the size of the asteroid that struck the earth 65 million years ago, wiping out all dinosaurs that walked, as well as the majority of life on earth." But the risk of a collision like that "is very, very low." NASA has estimated that a civilization-ending event (like the collision of an asteroid the size of Thursday's with the Earth) should only happen every few million years. And such an impact from an asteroid half a mile in diameter or bigger will be almost impossible for a very long time, according to findings published last year in The Astronomical Journal. NASA's catalog of large and dangerous objects like 2011 UL21 is now 95 percent complete, MIT Technology Review reported.

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It's been adapted into a graphic novel, a videogame, a radio play, and an opera, according to Wikipedia — which also describes years of trying to adapt Neuromancer into a movie. "The landmark 1984 cyberpunk novel has been on Hollywood's wishlist for decades," writes Gizmodo, "with multiple filmmakers attempting to bring it to the big screen." (Back in 2010, Slashdot's CmdrTaco even posted an update with the headline "Neuromancer Movie In Your Future?" with a 2011 story promising the movie deal was "moving forward....") But now Deadline reports it's becoming a 10-episode series on Apple TV+ (co-produced by Apple Studios) starring Callum Turner and Brianna Middleton: Created for television by Graham Roland and JD Dillard, Neuromancer follows a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case (Turner) who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly (Middleton), a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes, aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets. More from Gizmodo: "We're incredibly excited to be bringing this iconic property to Apple TV+," Roland and Dillard said in a statement. "Since we became friends nearly 10 years ago, we've looked for something to team up on, so this collaboration marks a dream come true. Neuromancer has inspired so much of the science fiction that's come after it and we're looking forward to bringing television audiences into Gibson's definitive 'cyberpunk' world." The novel launched Gibson's "Sprawl" trilogy of novels (building on the dystopia in his 1982 short story "Burning Chrome"), also resurrecting the "Molly Millions" character from Johnny Mnemonic — an even earlier short story from 1981...

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USENIX, the long-running OS/networking research group, also publishes a magazine called ;login:. Today the magazine's editor — security consultant Rik Farrow — stopped by Slashdot to share some new research. rikfarrow writes: Caching means using faster memory to store frequently requested data, and the most commonly used algorithm for determining which items to discard when the cache is full is Least Recently Used [or "LRU"]. These researchers have come up with a more efficient and scalable method that uses just a few lines of code to convert LRU to SIEVE. Just like a sieve, it sifts through objects (using a pointer called a "hand") to "filter out unpopular objects and retain the popular ones," with popularity based on a single bit that tracks whether a cached object has been visited: As the "hand" moves from the tail (the oldest object) to the head (the newest object), objects that have not been visited are evicted... During the subsequent rounds of sifting, if objects that survived previous rounds remain popular, they will stay in the cache. In such a case, since most old objects are not evicted, the eviction hand quickly moves past the old popular objects to the queue positions close to the head. This allows newly inserted objects to be quickly assessed and evicted, putting greater eviction pressure on unpopular items (such as "one-hit wonders") than LRU-based eviction algorithms. It's an example of "lazy promotion and quick demotion". Popular objects get retained with minimal effort, with quick demotion "critical because most objects are not reused before eviction." After 1559 traces (of 247,017 million requests to 14,852 million objects), they found SIEVE reduces the miss ratio (when needed data isn't in the cache) by more than 42% on 10% of the traces with a mean of 21%, when compared to FIFO. (And it was also faster and more scalable than LRU.) "SIEVE not only achieves better efficiency, higher throughput, and better scalability, but it is also very simple."

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America's Justice Department "is pushing for Boeing to plead guilty to a criminal charge," reports Reuters, "after finding the planemaker violated a settlement over fatal 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people, two people familiar with the matter said on Sunday." Boeing previously paid $2.5 billion as part of the deal with prosecutors that granted the company immunity from criminal prosecution over a fraud conspiracy charge related to the 737 MAX's flawed design. Boeing had to abide by the terms of the deferred prosecution agreement for a three-year period that ended on Jan. 7. Prosecutors would then have been poised to ask a judge to dismiss the fraud conspiracy charge. But in May, the Justice Department found Boeing breached the agreement, exposing the company to prosecution. A guilty plea could "carry implications for Boeing's ability to enter into government contracts," the article points out, "such as those with the U.S. military that make up a significant portion of its revenue..." The proposal would require Boeing to plead guilty to conspiring to defraud the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in connection with the fatal crashes, the sources said. The proposed agreement also includes a $487.2 million financial penalty, only half of which Boeing would be required to pay, they added. That is because prosecutors are giving the company credit for a payment it made as part of the previous settlement related to the fatal crashes of the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines flights. Boeing could also likely be forced to pay restitution under the proposal's terms, the amount of which will be at a judge's discretion, the sources said. The offer also contemplates subjecting Boeing to three years of probation, the people said. The plea deal would also require Boeing's board to meet with victims' relatives and impose an independent monitor to audit the company's safety and compliance practices for three years, they said. "Should Boeing refuse to plead guilty, prosecutors plan to take the company to trial, they said..." the article points out. "Justice Department officials revealed their decision to victims' family members during a call earlier on Sunday."

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A new study "has found direct evidence linking a key chemical ingredient of plastic bottles to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes," reports the Independent: The study, published in the journal Diabetes, found that the chemical BPA used to make food and drink packages, including plastic water bottles, can reduce sensitivity to the hormone insulin which regulates the body's sugar metabolism. The findings, to be presented at the 2024 Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association, call for the US Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider the safe limits for exposure to BPA in bottles and food containers. Previous studies have already shown that the chemical Bisphenol A (BPA) used to make plastic and epoxy resins could disrupt hormones in humans. While research has linked BPA to diabetes, no previous study has directly assessed if administration of this chemical to humans increases this risk in adults. The researchers administered the dosage considered safe by America's FDA to about 20 individuals — and discovered they became less responsive to insulin after 4 days. The article includes this warning from the researchers: "These results suggest that maybe the U.S. EPA safe dose should be reconsidered and that healthcare providers could suggest these changes to patients." Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the news.

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To stop their smartphone battery from swelling, long-time Slashdot reader shanen bought a Samsung Galaxy with a "restrictive charging option." But what setting should they use? The way this battery protection option worked was to stop charging the phone at 85%. That left me enough charge for my normal daily travels, which rarely took the phone below 50%, and the battery remained unswollen after a year, which included a month of quite heavy tethering, too. Unfortunately... After a recent upgrade, now my Galaxy has three options for the battery where it had two. The 85% option is still there, but it has been lowered to 80%. I've been using that for now and it still seems good enough. However my main concern is with the best option to maximize the overall lifespan of the smartphone... The other old option says something about using AI to control the battery charging, but I don't trust it and think it is just the old approach that causes phones to die quickly... The new third option is the one that is interesting me. This seems to be a kind of flutter charge where the phone will charge to 100% and then stop until it has dropped to 95% before charging again, even if it remains plugged in. This sounds attractive and would give me more battery insurance when I'm traveling, but maybe it reduces the overall lifetime of the phone? They tried getting answers from Samsung, but "I think I have been flagged as a low-profit customer." And of course, this raises several other questions? (Are other smartphones better? Have iPhones solved the battery-swelling issue?) And most importantly: is there a way to charge batteries without reducing their lifespan? Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. What's the best way to charge your smartphone battery?

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Commercial space efforts continue around the world, as the Chinese company Space Pioneer fired up a partially-fueled rocket engine Sunday for a short-duration test of its reusable rocket on the ground. But Space News reports that the test "ended in catastrophic failure and a dramatic explosion." "Amateur footage captured by Gongyi citizens and posted on Chinese social media shows the nine-engine test stage igntiing and then, exceptionally, taking off." Hold-down clamps and other structures are typically used to securely keep stages in place. The stage is seen climbing into the sky before halting, apparently with its engines shutting off, and returning to Earth. The stage impacted the ground around 50 seconds after it took off, apparently with much of its kerosene-liquid oxygen propellant remaining, causing a large explosion. The Tianlong-3 first stage would likely fire for a number of minutes on an orbital flight. Space Pioneer was conducting its test as a buildup to an orbital launch of the Tianlong-3, which is benchmarked against the SpaceX Falcon 9, in the coming months. The company announced earlier this month that it has secured $207 million in new funding. Shanghai-based digital newspaper The Paper reported Henan officials as saying there were no casualties reported. Space Pioneer issued its own statement later, stating there was a structural failure at the connection between the rocket body and the test bench. The rocket's onboard computer automatically shut down the engines and the rocket fell 1.5 kilometers southwest. It reiterated earlier reports that no casualties were found. The company said the test produced 820 tons of thrust. The article speculates on whether the event will delay the development of the rocket — or the planned launches for a Chinese megaconstellation of satellites. "Space Pioneer says it will conduct an analysis and restart testing with new hardware as soon as possible."

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Bloomberg and The Washington Post "claim AI power usage is dire," writes Slashdot reader NoWayNoShapeNoForm. But Ars Technica "begs to disagree with those speculations." From Ars Technica's article: The high-profile pieces lean heavily on recent projections from Goldman Sachs and the International Energy Agency (IEA) to cast AI's "insatiable" demand for energy as an almost apocalyptic threat to our power infrastructure. The Post piece even cites anonymous "some [people]" in reporting that "some worry whether there will be enough electricity to meet [the power demands] from any source." Digging into the best available numbers and projections available, though, it's hard to see AI's current and near-future environmental impact in such a dire light... While the headline focus of both Bloomberg and The Washington Post's recent pieces is on artificial intelligence, the actual numbers and projections cited in both pieces overwhelmingly focus on the energy used by Internet "data centers" as a whole... Bloomberg asks one source directly "why data centers were suddenly sucking up so much power" and gets back a blunt answer: "It's AI... It's 10 to 15 times the amount of electricity." Unfortunately for Bloomberg, that quote is followed almost immediately by a chart that heavily undercuts the AI alarmism. That chart shows worldwide data center energy usage growing at a remarkably steady pace from about 100 TWh in 2012 to around 350 TWh in 2024. The vast majority of that energy usage growth came before 2022, when the launch of tools like Dall-E and ChatGPT largely set off the industry's current mania for generative AI. If you squint at Bloomberg's graph, you can almost see the growth in energy usage slowing down a bit since that momentous year for generative AI. Ars Technica first cites Dutch researcher Alex de Vries's estimate that in a few years the AI sector could use between 85 and 134 TWh of power. But another study estimated in 2018 that PC gaming already accounted for 75 TWh of electricity use per year, while "the IEA estimates crypto mining ate up 110 TWh of electricity in 2022." More to the point, de Vries' AI energy estimates are only a small fraction of the 620 to 1,050 TWh that data centers as a whole are projected to use by 2026, according to the IEA's recent report. The vast majority of all that data center power will still be going to more mundane Internet infrastructure that we all take for granted (and which is not nearly as sexy of a headline bogeyman as "AI"). The future is also hard to predict, the article concludes. "If customers don't respond to the hype by actually spending significant money on generative AI at some point, the tech-marketing machine will largely move on, as it did very recently with the metaverse and NFTs..."

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It was analgous to the "Blue Screen of Death" that Windows gives for critical errors, Phoronix wrote. To enable error messages for things like a kernel panic, Linux 6.10 introduced a new panic handler infrastructure for "Direct Rendering Manager" (or DRM) drivers. Phoronix also published a follow-up from Red Hat engineer Javier Martinez Canillas (who was involved in the new DRM Panic infrastructure). Given complaints about being too like Microsoft Windows following his recent Linux "Blue Screen of Death" showcase... Javier showed that a black screen of death is possible if so desired... After all, it's all open-source and thus can customize to your heart's content. And now the panic handler is getting even more new features, Phoronix reported Friday: With the code in Linux 6.10 when DRM Panic is triggered, an ASCII art version of Linux's mascot, Tux the penguin, is rendered as part of the display. With Linux 6.11 it will also be able to handle displaying a monochrome image as the logo. If ASCII art on error messages doesn't satisfy your tastes in 2024+, the DRM Panic code will be able to support a monochrome graphical logo that leverages the Linux kernel's boot-up logo support. The ASCII art penguin will still be used when no graphical logo is found or when the existing "LOGO" Kconfig option is disabled. (Those Tux logo assets being here.) This monochrome logo support in the DRM Panic handler was sent out as part of this week's drm-misc-next pull request ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window in July. This week's drm-misc-next material also includes TTM memory management improvements, various fixes to the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers, and also the previously talked about monochrome TV support for the Raspberry Pi. Long-time Slashdot reader unixbhaskar thinks the new option "will certainly satisfy the modern people... But it is not as eye candy as people think... Moreover, it is monochrome, so certainly not resource-hungry. Plus, if all else fails, the ASCII art logo is still there to show!"

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What if across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, six high-voltage power cables stretched — each over 2,000 miles long. CNN reports that a group of entrepreneurs "wants to build what would be the world's largest subsea energy interconnector between continents, linking Europe and North America...to connect places like the United Kingdom's west with eastern Canada, and potentially New York with western France... "The Europe-US cables could send 6 gigawatts of energy in both directions at the speed of light, said Laurent Segalen, founder of the London-based Megawatt-X renewable energy firm, who is also part of the trio proposing the transatlantic interconnector. That's equivalent to what six large-scale nuclear power plants can generate, transmitted in near-real time." The interconnector would send renewable energy both east and west, taking advantage of the sun's diurnal journey across the sky. "When the sun is at its zenith, we probably have more power in Europe than we can really use," said Simon Ludlam, founder and CEO of Etchea Energy, and one of the trio of Europeans leading the project. "We've got wind and we've also got too much solar. That's a good time to send it to a demand center, like the East Coast of the United States. Five, six hours later, it's the zenith in the East Coast, and obviously, we in Europe have come back for dinner, and we get the reverse flow," he added. The transatlantic interconnector is still a proposal, but networks of green energy cables are starting to sprawl across the world's sea beds. They are fast becoming part of a global climate solution, transmitting large amounts of renewable energy to countries struggling to make the green transition alone. But they are also forging new relations that are reshaping the geopolitical map and shifting some of the world's energy wars down to the depths of the ocean... Already, energy cables run between several countries in Europe, most of them allied neighbors. Not all of them carry renewable power exclusively — that's sometimes determined by what makes up each country's energy grid — âbut new ones are typically being built for a green energy future. The UK, where land space for power plants is limited, is already connected with Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark under the sea. It has signed up to a solar and wind link with Morocco to take advantage of the North African country's many hours of sunlight and strong trade winds that run across the equator. Similar proposals are popping up around the globe. A project called Sun Cable seeks to send solar power from sunny Australia, where land is abundant, to the Southeast Asian nation of Singapore, which also has plenty of sun but very little room for solar farms. India and Saudi Arabia plan to link their respective power grids via the Arabian Sea, part of a broader economic corridor plan to connect Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

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It transforms water into the fuel — one of the first fuel plants in the world to do so. The Washington Post visits a facility in Corpus Christi, Texas using renewable energy to produce "green" hydrogen. The plant feeds water through machines that pull out its hydrogen atoms... [T]he hydrogen is chemically transformed into diesel for delivery trucks. This process could represent the biggest change in how fuel for planes, ships, trains and trucks is made since the first internal combustion engine fired up in the 19th century... Turning hydrogen into liquid fuel could help slash planet-warming pollution from heavy vehicles, cutting a key source of emissions that contribute to climate change. But to fulfill that promise, companies will have to build massive numbers of wind turbines and solar panels to power the energy-hungry process. Regulators will have to make sure hydrogen production doesn't siphon green energy that could go towards cleaning up other sources of global warming gases, such as homes or factories. Although cars and light trucks are shifting to electric motors, other forms of transport will likely rely on some kind of liquid fuel for the foreseeable future. Batteries are too heavy for planes and too bulky for ships. Extended charging times could be an obstacle for long-haul trucks, and some rail lines may be too expensive to electrify. Together, these vehicles represent roughly half of emissions from transportation, the fourth-biggest source of greenhouse gases. To wean machines off oil, companies like Infinium, the owner of this plant, are starting to churn out hydrogen-based fuels that — in the best case — produce close to net zero emissions. They could also pave the way for a new technology, hydrogen fuel cells, to power planes, ships and trucks in the second half of this century. For now, these fuels are expensive and almost no one makes them, so the U.S. government, businesses and philanthropists including Bill Gates are investing billions of dollars to build up a hydrogen industry that could cut eventually some of the most stubborn, hard-to-remove carbon pollution. Most scenarios for how the world could avoid the worst effects of climate change envision hydrogen cleaning up emissions in transportation, as well as in fertilizer production and steel and chemical refining. But if they're not made with dedicated renewable energy, hydrogen-based fuels could generate even more pollution than regular diesel, creating a wasteful boondoggle that sets the world back in the fight against climate change. Their potential comes down to the way plants like this produce them... Only about 40 percent of the power on the [Texas] electric grid is from renewables, with the rest coming from natural gas and coal, according to state data. That grid energy is what flows through the power line into the Infinium plant. "One day, heavy transportation may shift to fuel cells that run on pure hydrogen and emit only water vapor from their tailpipes," the article points out. But to accommodate today's carbon-burning vehicles, Infinium produces "chemical copies of existing fuels made with crude oil" by combining captured carbon with green hydrogen. "A truck running on diesel made from hydrogen using only renewable electricity would create 89 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions over the course of its lifetime than a truck burning diesel made from petroleum, according to a 2022 analysis from the European nonprofit Transport & Environment."

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Slashdot reader Required Snark shared this article from Ars Technica: Almost exactly two years ago, as it prepared for the next generation of human spaceflight, NASA chose a pair of private companies to design and develop new spacesuits. These were to be new spacesuits that would allow astronauts to both perform spacewalks outside the International Space Station as well as walk on the Moon as part of the Artemis program. Now, that plan appears to be in trouble, with one of the spacesuit providers — Collins Aerospace — expected to back out, Ars has learned. It's a blow for NASA, because the space agency really needs modern spacesuits. NASA's Apollo-era suits have long been retired. The current suits used for spacewalks in low-Earth orbit are four decades old. "These new capabilities will allow us to continue on the International Space Station and allows us to do the Artemis program and continue on to Mars," said the director of Johnson Space Center, Vanessa Wyche, during a celebratory news conference in Houston two years ago. The two winning teams were led by Collins Aerospace and Axiom Space, respectively. They were eligible for task orders worth up to $3.5 billion — in essence NASA would rent the use of these suits for a couple of decades. Since then, NASA has designated Axiom to work primarily on a suit for the Moon and the Artemis Program, and Collins with developing a suit for operations in-orbit, such as space station servicing... The agency has been experiencing periodic problems with the maintenance of the suits built decades ago, known as the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, which made its debut in the 1980s. NASA has acknowledged the suit has exceeded its planned design lifetime. Just this Monday, the agency had to halt a spacewalk after the airlock had been de-pressurized and the hatch opened due to a water leak in the service and cooling umbilical unit of Tracy Dyson's spacesuit. As a result of this problem, NASA will likely only be able to conduct a single spacewalk this summer, after initially planning three, to complete work outside the International Space Station. Collins designed the original Apollo suits, according to the article. But a person familiar with the situation told Ars Technica that "Collins has admitted they have drastically underperformed and have overspent" on their work, "culminating in a request to be taken off the contract or renegotiate the scope and their budget." Ironically, the company's top's post on their account on Twitter/X is still a repost of NASA's February announcement that they're "getting a nextx-generation spacesuit" developed by Collins Aerospace, and saying that the company "recently completed a key NASA design milestone aboard a commercial microgravity aircraft." NASA's post said they needed the suit "In order to advance NASA's spacewalking capabilities in low Earth orbit and to support continued maintenance and operations at the Space Station."

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Today the Wall Street Journal reported that restoring net neutrality to America is "on shakier legal footing after a Supreme Court decision on Friday shifted power away from federal agencies." "It's hard to overstate the impact that this ruling could have on the regulatory landscape in the United States going forward," said Leah Malone, a lawyer at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. "This could really bind U.S. agencies in their efforts to write new rules." Now that [the "Chevron deference"] is gone, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to have a harder time reviving net neutrality — a set of policies barring internet-service providers from assigning priority to certain web traffic... The Federal Communications Commission reclassified internet providers as public utilities under the Communications Act. There are pending court cases challenging the FCC's reinterpretation of that 1934 law, and the demise of Chevron deference heightens the odds of the agency losing in court, some legal experts said. "Chevron's thumb on the scale in favor of the agencies was crucial to their chances of success," said Geoffrey Manne, president of the International Center for Law and Economics. "Now that that's gone, their claims are significantly weaker." Other federal agencies could also be affected, according to the article. The ruling could also make it harder for America's Environmental Protection Agency to crack down on power-plant pollution. And the Federal Trade Commission face more trouble in court defending its recent ban on noncompete agreements. Lawyer Daniel Jarcho tells the Journal that the Court's decision "will unquestionably lead to more litigation challenging federal agency actions, and more losses for federal agencies." Friday a White House press secretary issued a statement calling the court's decision "deeply troubling," and arguing that the court had "decided in the favor of special interests".

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An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from the Verge: Threads will now let people like and see replies to their Threads posts that appear on other federated social media platforms, the company announced on Tuesday. Previously, if you made a post on Threads that was syndicated to another platform like Mastodon, you wouldn't be able to see responses to that post while still inside Threads. That meant you'd have to bounce back and forth between the platforms to stay up-to-date on replies... [I]n a screenshot, Meta notes that you can't reply to replies "yet," so it sounds like that feature will arrive in the future. "Threads is Meta's first app built to be compatible with the fediverse..." according to a Meta blog post. "Our vision is that people using other fediverse-compatible servers will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads profile, and vice versa, connecting communities..." [If you turn on "sharing"...] "Developers can build new types of features and user experiences that can easily plug into other open social networks, accelerating the pace of innovation and experimentation." And this week Instagram/Threads top executive Adam Mosseri posted that Threads is "also expanding the availability of the fediverse beta experience to more than 100 countries, and hope to roll it out everywhere soon."

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The Wall Street Journal reports that a European initiative studying the feasibility data centers in space "has found that the project could be economically viable" — while reducing the data center's carbon footprint. And they add that according to coordinator Thales Alenia Space, the project "could also generate a return on investment of several billion euros between now and 2050." The study — dubbed Ascend, short for Advanced Space Cloud for European Net zero emission and Data sovereignty — was funded by the European Union and sought to compare the environmental impacts of space-based and Earth-based data centers, the company said. Moving forward, the company plans to consolidate and optimize its results. Space data centers would be powered by solar energy outside the Earth's atmosphere, aiming to contribute to the European Union's goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, the project coordinator said... Space data centers wouldn't require water to cool them, the company said. The 16-month study came to a "very encouraging" conclusion, project manager Damien Dumestier told CNBC. With some caveats... The facilities that the study explored launching into space would orbit at an altitude of around 1,400 kilometers (869.9 miles) — about three times the altitude of the International Space Station. Dumestier explained that ASCEND would aim to deploy 13 space data center building blocks with a total capacity of 10 megawatts in 2036, in order to achieve the starting point for cloud service commercialization... The study found that, in order to significantly reduce CO2 emissions, a new type of launcher that is 10 times less emissive would need to be developed. ArianeGroup, one of the 12 companies participating in the study, is working to speed up the development of such reusable and eco-friendly launchers. The target is to have the first eco-launcher ready by 2035 and then to allow for 15 years of deployment in order to have the huge capacity required to make the project feasible, said Dumestier... Michael Winterson, managing director of the European Data Centre Association, acknowledges that a space data center would benefit from increased efficiency from solar power without the interruption of weather patterns — but the center would require significant amounts of rocket fuel to keep it in orbit. Winterson estimates that even a small 1 megawatt center in low earth orbit would need around 280,000 kilograms of rocket fuel per year at a cost of around $140 million in 2030 — a calculation based on a significant decrease in launch costs, which has yet to take place. "There will be specialist services that will be suited to this idea, but it will in no way be a market replacement," said Winterson. "Applications that might be well served would be very specific, such as military/surveillance, broadcasting, telecommunications and financial trading services. All other services would not competitively run from space," he added in emailed comments. [Merima Dzanic, head of strategy and operations at the Danish Data Center Industry Association] also signaled some skepticism around security risks, noting, "Space is being increasingly politicised and weaponized amongst the different countries. So obviously, there is a security implications on what type of data you send out there." Its not the only study looking at the potential of orbital data centers, notes CNBC. "Microsoft, which has previously trialed the use of a subsea data center that was positioned 117 feet deep on the seafloor, is collaborating with companies such as Loft Orbital to explore the challenges in executing AI and computing in space." The article also points out that the total global electricity consumption from data centers could exceed 1,000 terawatt-hours in 2026. "That's roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption of Japan, according to the International Energy Agency."

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Long-time Slashdot reader jrronimo says JILA physicist Jun Ye's group "has made a breakthrough towards the next stage of precision timekeeping." From their paper recently published to arXiv: Optical atomic clocks use electronic energy levels to precisely keep track of time. A clock based on nuclear energy levels promises a next-generation platform for precision metrology and fundamental physics studies.... These results mark the start of nuclear-based solid-state optical clocks and demonstrate the first comparison of nuclear and atomic clocks for fundamental physics studies. This work represents a confluence of precision metrology, ultrafast strong field physics, nuclear physics, and fundamental physics.

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Founded in 1846, the not-for-profit Associated Press distributes its news stories to other news outlets. But are free online sites putting those outlets at risk? This week the Associated Press wrote that a "crisis" in local and state news reporting "shows little signs of abating" — and that it's now setting up "a sister organization that will seek to raise money" for those outlets. The organization, which will have a board of directors independent of the AP, will solicit philanthropic spending to boost this news coverage, both within the AP and through outside organizations, the news outlet said Tuesday. "We feel we have to lean in at this point, not pull back," said Daisy Veerasingham, the AP's president and CEO. "But the supporting mechanism — the local newspaper market that used to support this — can't afford to do that anymore." Veerasingham said she's been encouraged by preliminary talks with some funders who have expressed concern about the state of local journalism... The local news industry has collapsed over the past two decades, with the number of journalists working in newspapers dropping from 75,000 to 31,000 in 2022, according to Northwestern University. More than half of the nation's counties have no local news outlets or only one. The AP's CEO offered this succinct summary of their goal. "We want to add new products and services to help the industry."

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"The outdoor-apparel brand Patagonia has given 90 U.S. employees a choice," reports Business Insider: "tell the company by Friday that you're willing to relocate or leave your job." [Alternate URL here.] The employees all work in customer services, known at Patagonia as the customer-experience, or CX, team, and have been allowed to work remotely to field calls and inquiries. These workers received a text and email Tuesday morning about an "important" meeting... Two company executives, Amy Velligan and Bruce Old, told staff in a 15-minute video meeting that the team would be moving to a new "hub" model. CX employees are now expected to live within 60 miles of one of seven "hubs" — Atlanta; Salt Lake City; Reno, Nevada; Dallas; Austin; Chicago; or Pittsburgh. Workers were offered $4,000 toward relocation costs and extra paid time off. Those willing to relocate were told to do so by September 30. If CX staff are not willing to live near a hub city, they must leave the company. They were given 72 hours, until Friday, to confirm their decision... Access to company laptops and phones was shut off later that day until employees either agreed to relocate or said they wanted the severance, one affected CX worker said... Both employees who spoke to Business Insider believed this was because Patagonia didn't want to handle the increased demands of employees in states with higher costs of living. "We've been asking for raises for a long time, and they keep telling us that your wage is based on a Reno cost of living and where you choose to live is on you." According to the article, "The company hopes to bring staff together at the hubs at least once every six weeks for in-person training, company gatherings, or 'Activism Hours'." A company spokesperson described the changes as "crucial for us to build a vibrant team culture," and said there were workers who had been complaining about feeling disconnected. Though there may be another motive: "The reality is that our CX team has been running at 200% to 300% overstaffed for much of this year," she added. "While we hoped to reach the needed staffing levels through attrition, those numbers were very low, and retention remained high." One affected worker told Business Insider that the company's proposal "was very factual. If you don't live in these seven metro areas, you either need to move there or give us your stuff and hit the brick. If we don't respond by Friday, they will assume that we have chosen the severance package and we'll start that process." One worker added that the severance package they received was generous... Thanks to Slashdot reader NoWayNoShapeNoForm for sharing the article.

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Lego teamed up with the European Space Agency to make Lego pieces from actual meteorite dust, writes Engadget. "It's a proof of concept to show how astronauts could use moondust to build lunar structures." Consider the sheer amount of energy and money required to haul up building materials from Earth to the Moon. It would be a game changer to, instead, build everything from pre-existing lunar materials. There's a layer of rock and mineral deposits at the surface of the Moon, which is called lunar regolith... However, there isn't too much lunar regolith here on Earth for folks to experiment with. ESA scientists made their own regolith by grinding up a really old meteorite. [4.5 billion years, according to Lego's site, discovered in Africa in 2000.] The dust from this meteorite was turned into a mixture that was used to 3D print the Lego pieces. Voila. Moon bricks. They click together just like regular Lego bricks, though they only come in one color (space gray obviously.) "The result is amazing," says ESA Science Officer Aidan Cowley on the Lego site (though "the bricks may look a little rougher than usual. Importantly the clutch power still works, enabling us to play and test our designs.") "Nobody has built a structure on the Moon," Cowley said in an ESA statement. "So it was great to have the flexibility to try out all kinds of designs and building techniques with our space bricks." And the bricks will also be "helping to inspire the next generation of space engineers," according to the ESA's announcement — since they'll be on display in select Lego stores in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia through September 20th.

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This week the Linux Foundation announced a new organization for decentralized systems and technologies, with an aim of "fostering innovation and collaboration" in both their development and deployment. It will build on existing Linux Foundation blockchain and digital identity projects, according to the announcement, while supporting "a rapidly growing decentralized technology landscape." To foster this broader ecosystem, LF Decentralized Trust will encompass the growing portfolio of Hyperledger projects and host new open source software, communities, standards, and specifications that are critical to the macro shift toward decentralized systems of distributed trust.... LF Decentralized Trust's expanded project and member ecosystem will be both essential to emerging tokenized assets classes and networks, as well as to modernizing the core infrastructure for finance, trade, government, healthcare, and more. LF Decentralized Trust will serve as a neutral home for the open development of a broad range of ledger, identity, security, interoperability, scale, implementation, and related technologies... LF Decentralized Trust will also include new directed funding models that will drive strategic investments by members into individual projects and project resources. "With LF Decentralized Trust, we're expanding our commitment to open source innovation by embracing a wider array of decentralized technologies," said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. "This new, elevated foundation will enable the community to build a more robust ecosystem that drives forward transparency, security, and efficiency in global infrastructure." "After eight years of advancing the development of blockchain, decentralized identity and related technologies via the Hyperledger community, the time has come to broaden our effort and impact," said Daniela Barbosa, General Manager, Blockchain and Identity, the Linux Foundation. "Ledgers and ledger technologies are but one component of the decentralized systems that will underpin a digital-first global economy. LF Decentralized Trust is where we will gather and grow an expanded community and portfolio of technologies to deliver the transparency, reliability, security and efficiency needed to successfully upgrade critical systems around the world." The announcement includes quotes of support from numerous companies including Oracle, Siemens, Visa, Accenture, Citi, and Hitachi. Some highlights: "The formation of the LF Decentralized Trust reflects the growing demand for open source resources that are critical to the management and functionality of decentralized systems." — CEO of Digital Asset "The adoption of decentralized infrastructure is at an inflection point, reflecting the increasing demand from both enterprises and consumers for more secure and transparent digital transactions. As the industry leader for onchain data, blockchain abstraction, and interoperability, we're excited to see the formation of the LF Decentralized Trust and to expand our collaboration with leading financial institutions on advancing tokenized assets and the onchain economy at large." — CMO at Chainlink Labs. "As a founding member of the Hyperledger Foundation, and given our unique position in the financial markets, we recognize the vast potential for open-source innovation and decentralized technologies when it comes to reducing risk, increasing resiliency and improving security. The expansion of Hyperledger Foundation into LF Decentralized Trust represents an exciting opportunity to continue expanding these groundbreaking technologies." — a managing director at DTCC

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In November of 2022, "More than 800 people were selected to participate in the Denver Basic Income Project," reports the Colorado Sun, "while they were living on the streets, in shelters, on friends' couches or in vehicles. One group received $1,000 a month, according to the article, while a second group received $6,500 in the first month, and then $500 for the next 11 months. (And a "control" group received $50 a month.) Amazingly, about 45% of participants in all three groups "were living in a house or apartment that they rented or owned by the study's 10-month check-in point, according to the research." The number of nights spent in shelters among participants in the first and second groups decreased by half. And participants in those two groups reported an increase in full-time work, while the control group reported decreased full-time employment. The project also saved tax dollars, according to the report. Researchers tallied an estimated $589,214 in savings on public services, including ambulance rides, visits to hospital emergency departments, jail stays and shelter nights... The study, which began in November 2022 with payments to the first group of participants, has been extended for an additional eight months, until September, and organizers are attempting to raise money to extend it further.

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Tom's Hardware reports that Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (working with the Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies and Nokia Bell) set a 402 terabits per second data transfer record — over commercially available optical fiber cables. The NICT and its partners were able to transmit signals through 1,505 channels over 50 km (about 31 miles) of optic fiber cable for this experiment. It used six types of amplifiers and an optical gain equalizer that taps into the unused 37 THz bandwidth to enable the 402 Tb/s transfer speed. One of the amplifiers this was demonstrated with is a thulium-based doped fiber amplifier, which uses C-band or C+L band systems. Additionally, semiconductor optical amplifiers and Raman amplifiers were used, which achieved 256 Tb/s data rate through almost 20 THz. Other amplifiers were also used for this exercise which provided a cumulative bandwidth of 25 THz for up to 119 Tb/s data rate. As a result, its maximum achievable result surpassed the previous data rate capacity by over 25 percent and increased transmission bandwidth by 35 percent. "This is achievable with currently available technology used by internet service providers..." the article points out. "With 'beyond 5G' potential speeds achievable through commercially available cables, it will likely further a new generation of internet services."

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