“Thousands of stunned guests were on hand Saturday night to watch a Disneyland malfunction for the ages,” writes SFGate — when a 45-foot-tall animatronic dragon burst into flames, and continued burning for several minutes in front of the stunned crowd.

SFGate reports:
The fire occurred during the 10:30 p.m. performance of Fantasmic, a show staged on the Rivers of America. The elaborate show uses ships, barges, projections on the water and fire effects to tell the story of Mickey Mouse’s dreams and nightmares. Near the end of the show, the dragon form of Maleficent from “Sleeping Beauty,” emerges from the island.

The big finale went awry Saturday, and flames engulfed the entire dragon. Video taken by shocked spectators shows the fire beginning on the dragon’s face and rapidly spreading down its body as chunks of flaming debris fall to the ground. Smoke and heavy flames billow from the prop as firefighters begin hosing down the dragon. The remainder of the show was canceled, and guests were escorted out of the immediate area…

The dragon, one of the most memorable parts of Disneyland’s beloved nighttime spectacular, has jokingly been referred to as Murphy, a reference to Murphy’s law. Over the decades, it’s been part of countless malfunctions and mishaps, although none quite so destructive as this. Though it is supposed to breathe fire, there are times when the effect doesn’t work at all.

“Disneyland employees armed with garden hoses and fire extinguishers were no match for the inferno,” reports the Orange County Register. “The dragon’s head erupted into a fireball and a flamethrower effect from the dragon’s mouth shot directly toward the stage, according to MiceChat.”

The newspaper has a picture of the charred mechanical skeleton that was still lying on the ground Sunday on Tom Sawyer Island — and a 146-second video of the blaze. (Apparently realizing they’re witnessing an unplanned fire, one spectator can be heard telling another one wryly, “Happy birthday, Danny.”)

“Some spectators thought it was part of the show,” reports the New York Times. One visitor told the newspaper, “My sister and I were talking about how it was impressive. I was like, ‘Man, they can set that head on fire and it just stays perfectly intact?’ So we were kind of amazed at Disney at first…”

When interviewed by the Associated Press, Ryan Laux, a frequent Disneyland visitor, “said Mickey vanished from the stage as soon as the dragon’s head became engulfed in flames.”

Then a voice over a loudspeaker announced the show wouldn’t continue “due to unforeseen circumstances…” (as heard in the video). “We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause — and hope you enjoy the rest of your evening here at Disneyland. Once again, this performance cannot continue due to unforeseen circumstances. Thank you.” At that moment the head burst into more flames, some members of the audience gasped in unison — and the announcement continued playing in Spanish. (“No podemos continuar con este presentacion…”) Then cheery banjo music began playing.

At least six workers were eventually treated for smoke inhalation from the burning dragon prop, reports the New York Times.

In a statement Disney said they were now “temporarily suspending fire effects” in “select” shows in their parks around the world — “out of an abundance of caution.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – An Enormous Animatronic Dragon Caught on Fire at Disneyland

Last year Python’s massive PyPI repository of pre-written software packages had 235.7 billion downloads — a 57% annual growth in its download counts and bandwidth. So now Python’s nonprofit Python Software Foundation has an announcement.
Their director of infrastructure said today that they’re rolling out “the first step in our plan to build financial support and long-term sustainability of PyPI, while simultaneously giving our users one of our most requested features: organization accounts.”

Organizations on PyPI are self-managed teams, with their own exclusive branded web addresses. Our goal is to make PyPI easier to use for large community projects, organizations, or companies who manage multiple sub-teams and multiple packages.

We’re making organizations available to community projects for free, forever, and to corporate projects for a small fee. Additional priority support agreements will be available to all paid subscribers, and all revenue will go right back into PyPI to continue building better support and infrastructure for all our users… Having more people using and contributing to Python every year is an fantastic problem to have, but it is one we must increase organizational capacity to accommodate. Increased revenue for PyPI allows it to become a staffed platform that can respond to support requests and attend to issues in a timeframe that is significantly faster than what our excellent (but thinly spread) largely volunteer team could reasonably handle.

We want to be very clear — these new features are completely optional. If features for larger projects don’t sound like something that would be useful to you as a PyPI maintainer, then there is no obligation to create an organization and absolutely nothing about your PyPI experience will change for you.

We look forward to discussing what other features PyPI users would like to see tackled next…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Python’s PyPI Will Sell ‘Organization Accounts’ to Corporate Projects to Fund Staff

The Associated Press visited a 100-foot barge moored in Los Angeles where engineers built “a kind of floating laboratory to answer a simple question: Is there a way to cleanse seawater of carbon dioxide and then return it to the ocean so it can suck more of the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere to slow global warming?”

The technology, dubbed SeaChange, developed by the University of California Los Angeles engineering faculty, is meant to seize on the ocean’s natural abilities, said Gaurav Sant, director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management. The process sends an electrical charge through seawater flowing through tanks on the barge. That then sets off a series of chemical reactions that trap the greenhouse gas into a solid mineral that includes calcium carbonate — the same thing seashells are made of. The seawater is then returned to the ocean and can pull more carbon dioxide out of the air. The calcium carbonate settles to the sea floor.

Plans are now underway to scale up the idea with another demonstration site starting this month in Singapore. Data collected there and at the Port of Los Angeles will help in the design of larger test plants. Those facilities are expected to be running by 2025 and be able to remove thousands of tons of CO2 per year. If they are successful, the plan is to build commercial facilities to remove millions of tons of carbon annually, Sant said…

Scientists estimate at least 10 billion metric tons of carbon will need to be removed from the air annually beginning in 2050, and the pace will need to continue over the next century… According to the UCLA team, at least 1,800 industrial-scale facilities would be needed to capture 10 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide per year, but fewer could still make a dent.
The article notes alternate ideas from other researchers — including minerals on beaches that increase the ocean’s alkalinity so it can absorb more carbon dioxide.

But this SeaChange process also produces hydrogen. So the director of UCLA’s Carbon Management institute also founded a startup that generates revenue from that hydrogen (and from “carbon credits” sold to other companies) — hoping to lower the cost of removing atmospheric carbon to below $100 per metric ton.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Another Ocean Climate Solution Attempted by California Researchers

“Once-booming demand for cloud-computing services is slowing…” reports Bloomberg. “When Microsoft and Amazon report results next week, analysts are anticipating the slowest revenue growth for their cloud-computing businesses since the firms started breaking out performance last decade.”

For years, demand for cloud-computing services has steadily driven growth at both Microsoft and Amazon… Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud unit, which is home to its Azure cloud-services business, accounted for 38% of its revenue and 39% of operating income in 2022. Amazon Web Services was the fastest-growing of the Seattle-based company’s major businesses last year and generated $22.8 billion in operating income. The rest of Amazon’s businesses combined posted a $10.6 billion operating loss.

For both companies, cracks are starting to appear. In the first three months of 2023, growth for Microsoft’s Azure unit and Amazon Web Services is expected to fall to 31% and 14%, respectively, excluding currency fluctuations, according to the average of analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. A year ago, Azure sales expanded 49% and Amazon Web Services 37%.

In a shareholder letter released last week, Amazon said AWS “faces short-term head winds” related to the economic backdrop that will “soften” the growth rate. This echoed what it said in its most recent results. Microsoft also warned of a slowdown in cloud software sales last quarter. Wall Street has been getting more cautious. UBS lowered growth estimates for Azure last week, warning “customer efforts to optimize/trim their cloud spend will be deeper and last longer than most think….” Jefferies [financial services company] sees slowing cloud demand as “a key concern” for Amazon. Analyst Brent Thill said that because AWS generates so much of Amazon’s operating income, “a stabilization in cloud is crucial for shares to outperform.”

For Alec Young, chief investment strategist at MAPsignals, Microsoft and Amazon remain attractive despite the slowdown, which he expects to be a temporary pause before growth re-accelerates. “There’s still a lot of runway ahead for cloud computing, so I don’t think investors should obsess too much over the level of growth over a couple quarters,” he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Cloud Profits May Be Slowing at Microsoft and Amazon

An anonymous reader shared this scathing rant from the Verge:

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that smart speakers should just shut up. I don’t want to know when Siri / Alexa / Google has locked my front door — I just asked it to do that and I expect it to happen. (We’ll put a pin in the fact that it doesn’t always do this). So Google’s announcement this week that it’s taking more steps to stop its Google Assistant from chattering away to you every time you send a command to a Nest smart speaker is a welcome one.

The Assistant already stays schtum when you ask it to turn the lights off in the room you’re in, sending a gentle chime to let you know it was successful. (You know, in case THE LIGHTS TURNING OFF didn’t alert you to this fact.) However, it still loves to have a good old chat when you ask it to do something like change the temperature of your thermostat. “Okay, setting the living room AC to 76 degrees.” This new change will, according to a community blog post from Google, roll out over the next few weeks. It will make the speaker chime instead of starting a conversation when you ask it to control smart devices, including switches, plugs, fans, blinds, TVs, and speakers.

However, this is still only for the room you and the speaker are in. So, when I’m in bed at night and softly request my Nest Hub to turn off the living room lights, it will still loudly respond, “TURNING OFF LIVING ROOM LIGHTS.” Sigh.

The article argues the problem is specific to Google’s speakers. “Knowing when to be silent is something every other smart speaker manufacturer figured out a while back.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ‘Google’s Smart Speakers are Finally Smart Enough to Shut Up’

“Arm is developing its own chip,” reports the Financial Times, “to showcase the capabilities of its designs, as the SoftBank-owned group seeks to attract new customers and fuel growth following a blockbuster IPO later this year.”
The company will team up with manufacturing partners to develop the new chip, according to people briefed on the move who describe it as the most advanced chipmaking effort the Cambridge-headquartered group has ever embarked upon. The effort comes just as SoftBank seeks to drive up Arm’s profits and attract investors to a planned listing on New York’s Nasdaq exchange… The hope is that the prototype will allow it to demonstrate the power and capabilities of its designs to the wider market.

Arm has previously built some test chips with partners including Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, largely aimed at enabling software developers to gain familiarity with new products. However, multiple industry executives told the FT that its newest chip — on which it started work in the past six months — is “more advanced” than ever before. Arm has also formed a bigger team that will execute the effort and is targeting the product at chip manufacturers more than software developers, they said…

Rumblings about Arm’s chipmaking moves have stoked fears in the semiconductor industry that if it makes a good enough chip, it could seek to sell it in the future and thereby become a competitor to some of its biggest customers, such as MediaTek or Qualcomm. People close to Arm insist there are no plans to sell or license the product and that it is only working on a prototype. Arm declined to comment.

The article cites “people briefed on the move” as saying that Arm plans to build prototype chips for laptops, mobile devices, and other electronics. “The team will also expand on Arm’s existing efforts to enhance the performance and security of designs, as well as bolster developer access to its products. ”

The article points out that the head of Arm’s engineering team previously oversaw the development of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Arm is Developing Its Own Advanced Chip

Last week there was some good news for startups working on commercial nuclear fusion in the U.S. And it came from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC), the top governing body for America’s nuclear power plants nuclear materials, reports CNBC:

The top regulatory agency for nuclear materials safety in the U.S. voted unanimously to regulate the burgeoning fusion industry differently than the nuclear fission industry, and fusion startups are celebrating that as a major win. As a result, some provisions specific to fission reactors, like requiring funding to cover claims from nuclear meltdowns, won’t apply to fusion plants. (Fusion reactors cannot melt down….)

Other differences include looser requirements around foreign ownership of nuclear fusion plants, and the dispensing of mandatory hearings at the federal level during the licensing process, said Andrew Holland, CEO of the industry group, the Fusion Industry Association… The approach to regulating fusion is akin to the regulatory regime that is currently used to regulate particle accelerators, which are machines that are capable of making elementary nuclear particles, like electrons or protons, move really fast, the Fusion Industry Association says…

Technically speaking, fusion will be regulated under Part 30 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Jeff Merrifield, a former NRC commissioner, told CNBC. The regulatory structure for nuclear fission is under Part 50 of that code. “The regulatory structure needed to regulate particle accelerators under Part 30, is far simpler, less costly and more efficient than the more complicated rules imposed on fission reactors under Part 50,” Merrifield told CNBC. “By making this decision to use the Part 30, the commission recognized the decreased risk of fusion technologies when compared with traditional nuclear reactors and has imposed a framework that more appropriately aligns the risks and the regulations,” he said.
“Private fusion companies have raised about $5 billion to commercialize and scale fusion technology,” the article points out, “and so the decision from the NRC on how the industry would be regulated is a big deal for companies building in the space.” And they shared three reactions from the commercial fusion industry:

The CEO of the industry group, the Fusion Industry Association told CNBC the decision was
“extremely important.”
The scientific director for fusion startup Focused Energy told CNBC the decision “removes a major area of uncertainty for the industry.”
The general counsel for nuclear fusion startup Helion told CNBC. “It is now incumbent on us to demonstrate our safety case as we bring fusion to the grid, and we look forward to working with the public and regulatory community closely on our first deployments.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Nuclear Fusion Won’t Be Regulated in the US the Same Way as Nuclear Fission