San Diego Comic-Con has been very good to Star Trek in recent years, and even as Hollywood labor movements mean the franchise’s stars are sitting out of the action in Hall H this year, there was still plenty to be excited about in Star Trek’s new panel—like a long awaited first look at the return of Lower Decks.
Source: Gizmodo – Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Season 4 Trailer Teases New Friends and New Adventures
The end may be coming for Star Trek: Discovery—in March, word came that the series will wrap up in early 2024 after its fifth season—but plenty of thrills will be packed into its final mission. Thanks to San Diego Comic-Con, we have a new trailer that offers the best glimpse of season five’s treasure-hunt mystery…
Source: Gizmodo – Star Trek: Discovery Prepares For One Last Ride In a New SDCC Clip
Slashdot reader sonlas writes: The government’s green energy plans faced a setback as the Norfolk Boreas offshore windfarm project by Vattenfall was halted due to soaring supply chain costs and rising interest rates. Vattenfall’s chief executive Anna Borg said: “It’s important to understand that our suppliers are being squeezed. They have problems in their supply chain so it’s not so easy to mitigate these situations.” The 40% increase in expenses was driven by high global gas prices impacting manufacturing costs, making the project unprofitable. The decision to halt work on the Norfolk Boreas windfarm has cost Vattenfall £415 million, but Borg said the move was “prudent” given the impact of costs on the project’s future profitability. In a related news, energy majors BP and TotalEnergies have won a 7GW offshore wind site auction in Germany worth a record $14.1 billion. However, even back in 2022 market experts were warning governments that those additional costs for energy producers have negative impacts. It is important to bear in mind that negative bidding places extra financial burdens on wind farm developers. These additional costs need to be transferred to someone else, either to consumers through increased energy bills or to suppliers, as the developers have less money to invest in the turbines. Those two news are related in the sense that what has been shown so far is that in a world where fossil fuels are cheap and abundant, renewables, and especially offshore windfarm, are cheap and easy to deploy. However, signs are pointing toward a world where fossil fuels supply is not as cheap and abundant as expected, and that may have an impact on plans made by governments to reach Net Zero, or to even just reduce their CO2 emissions.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Norfolk Coast Giant Offshore Windfarm Halted Due To Spiralling Costs
Comic-Con may be more about movies and TV than comics some years, some times it’s more about comics than movies and TV (especially this year). But one thing it always is, thanks to Hasbro: a nightmare on your wallet for Marvel and Star Wars fans.
Source: Gizmodo – All the Hasbro Marvel and Star Wars Toys Revealed at San Diego Comic-Con
SolidRun launched today a new SD-WAN appliance built around the Marvell OCTEON CN9131 System-on-Chip designed for intelligent networking applications. Some of the key features of the SOLIDWAN CN9131 are its multiple ethernet ports and wide expansion ports. The Marvell CN9130 family is described as a versatile System-on-Chip solution based on Armv8 CPU technology, suitable for […]
Source: LXer – SolidRun Introduces Fanless Compact PC with OCTEON Quad-core SoC
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:
Sam Bankman-Fried’s younger brother, who was a top lobbyist for failed crypto exchange FTX, considered purchasing the island nation of Nauru in the Pacific to create a fortified apocalypse bunker state, a lawsuit filed in Delaware bankruptcy court shows.
Gabe Bankman-Fried was looking at buying Nauru in the “event where 50%-99.99% of people die” to protect his philanthropic allies and create a genetically enhanced human species, according to the suit filed Thursday by attorneys from Sullivan & Cromwell, which is seeking to recover billions of dollars following the collapse of FTX… Along with an unnamed philanthropic officer of FTX, Gabe Bankman-Fried considered buying Nauru, in part to foster “sensible regulation around human genetic enhancement, and build a lab there….”
In addition to serving as a haven in case of apocalypse, “probably there are other things it’s useful to do with a sovereign country, too,” according to a memo between the younger Bankman-Fried and the philanthropic advisor, which was noted in the suit.
“A representative for Nauru confirmed the island nation was not and has never been for sale.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – FTX Lobbyist Tried to Buy Pacific Island to Create a New Superspecies, Lawsuit Says
The Eisner Awards awarded its 2023 winners last night at San Diego Comic-Con. While Image had the most total nominations, and DC the second-most, DC’s Nightwing won all three of the categories it was recognized for: Best Continuing Series, Best Penciller/Inker or Penciller/Inker Team, and Best Cover Artist. One of…
Source: Gizmodo – The 2023 Eisner Award Winners Are Here
In this week’s column we wish Slackware a happy 30th birthday, look forward to the soon to be landing Mageia 9, and get the bugs out of LibreOffice 7.5.5.
The post FOSS Week in Review: Slackware Turns 30, Mageia 9 Coming Soon, & LibreOffice 7.5.5 appeared first on FOSS Force.
Source: FOSS Force – FOSS Week in Review: Slackware Turns 30, Mageia 9 Coming Soon, & LibreOffice 7.5.5
AMD’s Zen 4 processors are powerful; the Ryzen 9 7950X set new records in all of our productivity benchmarks when it came out. It “only” has 16 CPU cores, two memory channels, and 24 available PCIe lanes, though. What if you need some real horsepower to crunch through demanding workstation tasks?
Well, there’s no replacement for displacement.
Source: Hot Hardware – AMD Threadripper Pro 7985WX Monster 64-Core CPU Breaks Cover In Benchmarks
It’s time to showcase io9’s favorite cosplays of the day at San Diego Comic-Con 2023.
Source: Gizmodo – The Most Awesome Cosplay of San Diego Comic-Con 2023, Day 2
The Washington Post’s “Tech Friend” newsletter has the latest on Google’s “Enhanced Safe Browsing” for Chrome and Gmail, which “monitors the web addresses of sites that you visit and compares them to constantly updated Google databases of suspected scam sites.”
You’ll see a red warning screen if Google believes you’re on a website that is, for example, impersonating your bank. You can also check when you’re downloading a file to see if Google believes it might be a scam document. In the normal mode without Enhanced Safe Browsing, Google still does many of those same security checks. But the company might miss some of the rapid-fire activity of crooks who can create a fresh bogus website minutes after another one is blocked as a scam.
This enhanced security feature has been around for three years, but Google recently started putting a message in Gmail inboxes suggesting that people turn on Enhanced Safe Browsing.
Security experts told me that it’s a good idea to turn on this safety feature but that it comes with trade-offs. The company already knows plenty about you, particularly when you’re logged into Gmail, YouTube, Chrome or other Google services. If you turn on Enhanced Safe Browsing, Google may know even more about what sites you’re visiting even if you’re not signed into a Google account. It also collects bits of visual images from sites you’re visiting to scan for hallmarks of scam sites.
Google said it will only use this information to stop bad guys and train its computers to improve security for you and everyone else. You should make the call whether you are willing to give up some of your privacy for extra security protections from common crimes.
Gmail users can toggle the feature on or off at this URL. Google tells users that enabling the feature will provide “faster and more proactive protection against dangerous websites, downloads, and extensions.”
The Post’s reporter also asked Google why it doesn’t just enable the extra security automatically, and “The company told me that because Google is collecting more data in Enhanced Safe Browsing mode, it wants to ask your permission.”
The Post adds as an aside that “It’s also not your fault that phishing scams are everywhere. Our whole online security system is unsafe and stupid… Our goal should be to slowly replace the broken online security system with newer technologies that ditch our crime-prone password system for different methods of verifying we are who we say we are.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Google Urges Gmail Users to Enable ‘Enhanced Safe Browsing’ for Faster, More Proactive Protection
Building off last month’s release of Debian 12.0, Debian 12.1 is out today to ship dozens of bug fixes…
Source: Phoronix – Debian 12.1 Released With Many Bug Fixes
After debuting in 1999, multiple Emmy winner Futurama had an on-and-off existence across Fox, the direct-to-DVD realm, and Comedy Central, with its apparent finale in 2013—until news came last year that Hulu had ordered 20 new episodes. The first 10 arrive July 24, and fans will be glad to know they were worth the…
Source: Gizmodo – Futurama’s Return Is Equal Parts Nostalgic and Very, Very 2023
The just-released Whonix 17 security-hardened Linux distro is everything privacy-focused and anonymity paranoids have been dreaming of. Here’s more about it!
Source: LXer – Whonix Linux: Your Key to Ultimate Online Anonymity
In 2018 a doctoral student spotted “a spinning celestial space object,” reports CNN. “The unfamiliar object released giant bursts of energy and beamed out radiation three times per hour.”
But that was just the beginning…
In those moments, it became the brightest source of radio waves viewable from Earth through radio telescopes, acting like a celestial lighthouse. Researchers thought the phenomenon might be a remnant of a collapsed star — either a dense neutron star or a dead white dwarf star — with a strong magnetic field. Or perhaps the object was something else entirely… “We were stumped,” said Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker, senior lecturer at the Curtin University node of ICRAR, in a statement. “So we started searching for similar objects to find out if it was an isolated event or just the tip of the iceberg.” The team observed the sky using the Murchison Widefield Array, a radio telescope on Wajarri Yamaji Country in outback Western Australia, between July and September 2022. The scientists discovered an object 15,000 light-years from Earth in the Scutum constellation. The object, dubbed GPM J1839-10, released radio waves every 22 minutes. The bursts of energy lasted up to five minutes.
Astronomers believe it could be a magnetar, or a rare type of star with extremely strong magnetic fields that is capable of releasing powerful, energetic bursts. But if the object is a magnetar, it defies description because all known magnetars release energy in a matter of seconds, or a few minutes at the most. A study detailing the discovery was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. “This remarkable object challenges our understanding of neutron stars and magnetars, which are some of the most exotic and extreme objects in the Universe,” said Hurley-Walker, who was the lead author of the new report…
“Assuming it’s a magnetar, it shouldn’t be possible for this object to produce radio waves. But we’re seeing them. And we’re not just talking about a little blip of radio emission. Every 22 minutes, it emits a five-minute pulse of radio wavelength energy, and it’s been doing that for at least 33 years. Whatever mechanism is behind this is extraordinary.”
The astronomers “searched through the archives of radio telescopes that have been operational for decades,” the article points out — and ultimately confirmed the existence of the phenomenon. “It showed up in observations by the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India and the Very Large Array in the USA had observations dating as far back as 1988,” Hurley-Walker said.
“That was quite an incredible moment for me. I was five years old when our telescopes first recorded pulses from this object, but no one noticed it, and it stayed hidden in the data for 33 years. They missed it because they hadn’t expected to find anything like it.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – How Astronomers Discovered an Unusual Object Pulsing Radio Waves in Space for Decades
In 2018 a doctoral student spotted “a spinning celestial space object,” reports CNN. “The unfamiliar object released giant bursts of energy and beamed out radiation three times per hour.”
But that was just the beginning…
In those moments, it became the brightest source of radio waves viewable from Earth through radio telescopes, acting like a celestial lighthouse. Researchers thought the phenomenon might be a remnant of a collapsed star — either a dense neutron star or a dead white dwarf star — with a strong magnetic field. Or perhaps the object was something else entirely… “We were stumped,” said Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker, senior lecturer at the Curtin University node of ICRAR, in a statement. “So we started searching for similar objects to find out if it was an isolated event or just the tip of the iceberg.” The team observed the sky using the Murchison Widefield Array, a radio telescope on Wajarri Yamaji Country in outback Western Australia, between July and September 2022. The scientists discovered an object 15,000 light-years from Earth in the Scutum constellation. The object, dubbed GPM J1839-10, released radio waves every 22 minutes. The bursts of energy lasted up to five minutes.
Astronomers believe it could be a magnetar, or a rare type of star with extremely strong magnetic fields that is capable of releasing powerful, energetic bursts. But if the object is a magnetar, it defies description because all known magnetars release energy in a matter of seconds, or a few minutes at the most. A study detailing the discovery was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. “This remarkable object challenges our understanding of neutron stars and magnetars, which are some of the most exotic and extreme objects in the Universe,” said Hurley-Walker, who was the lead author of the new report…
“Assuming it’s a magnetar, it shouldn’t be possible for this object to produce radio waves. But we’re seeing them. And we’re not just talking about a little blip of radio emission. Every 22 minutes, it emits a five-minute pulse of radio wavelength energy, and it’s been doing that for at least 33 years. Whatever mechanism is behind this is extraordinary.”
The astronomers “searched through the archives of radio telescopes that have been operational for decades,” the article points out — and ultimately confirmed the existence of the phenomenon. “It showed up in observations by the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India and the Very Large Array in the USA had observations dating as far back as 1988,” Hurley-Walker said.
“That was quite an incredible moment for me. I was five years old when our telescopes first recorded pulses from this object, but no one noticed it, and it stayed hidden in the data for 33 years. They missed it because they hadn’t expected to find anything like it.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Astronomers Just Discovered an Unusual Object Pulsing Radio Waves in Space for Decades
If you’re a Star Wars toy fan you probably already heard about Hasbro’s latest announcement. It’s going to release a mega, super, duper version of The Ghost from Star Wars Rebels and Ahsoka though its Haslab program. If 8,000 people pledge $500 to buy the ship before September 7, it’ll be made. And considering as of…
Source: Gizmodo – Get Up Close and Personal With The Ghost, Hasbro’s Latest Star Wars Haslab
At one point Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb dons his iconic uniform — a fedora cap, a smoking pipe, a slightly over-sized suit — like Batman wearing his cape and cowl for the first time. It’s a look that serves as a sort of armor against mere mortals, who he woos with a peculiar charisma, as well as the military and political bureaucracy he battles while leading the Manhattan Project. It’s also a way for Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) to ground himself as he wrestles with the major conflict around his work: Building an atomic bomb could help to the war, but at what cost to humanity?
Oppenheimer may seem like a curious project for Nolan: Since wrapping up his Batman trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises, he’s thrown himself into increasingly complex projects (perhaps to atone for that disappointment). Interstellar was ostensibly a story about a man exploring the cosmos to find a new planet for humanity, but it also wrestled with personal sacrifices as his children aged beyond him.
Dunkirk was a purely cinematic, almost dialog-free depiction of a famous wartime evacuation. And Tenet was a bold attempt at mixing another heady sci-fi concept (what if you could go backwards through time?!) with bombastic James Bond-esque set pieces. Oppenheimer, meanwhile, is a mostly talky film set in a variety of meeting rooms, save for one explosive sequence.
Take a step back, though, and a film about an intelligent and very capable man wrestling with huge moral issues is very much in the Nolan wheelhouse. Oppenheimer’s swaggering genius fits right alongside Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne/Batman, the dedicated magicians in The Prestige or the expert dream divers/super spies in Inception.
The film, which is based on the biography American Prometheus by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird, follows Oppenheimer from his time in Germany as a doctoral student, to his professorship at UC Berkeley. He mingles with notable scientists, including Albert Einstein himself, and makes a name for himself as a quantum physics researcher. We see Oppenheimer as more than just a bookish geek: He sends money to anti-fascists fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he pushes for unionization among lab workers and professors, and he supports local Communists. (Something that will come back to haunt him later.)
It’s not too long before he’s recruited to the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, and the myth-making truly begins. Like a Nolan heist film, he assembles a team of the brightest scientific minds in America and beyond, and he pushes the government to establish a town doubling as a secret research base in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The film is strongest when it focuses on the specificities of the Manhattan Project: the rush to build a bomb before Nazi Germany, the pushback from scientists terrified about the damage “the gadget” could do.
The movie firmly focuses on Oppenheimer’s point of view, so much so that we mainly see him as a heroic tortured genius. Only he can put the right scientists together and motivate them to work; only he can solve the riddles of quantum physics to keep America safe. Some colleagues criticize his cavalier attitude about building an atomic bomb — they think it can lead to untold disaster, while he naively thinks it may be so powerful it may end all war. But, for the most part, we’re left feeling that he was a great man who was ultimately betrayed by a country that didn’t care for his post-war anti-nuclear activism.
I wasn’t able to see Oppenheimer on an IMAX screen, unfortunately, but sitting front row in a local theater still managed to be a thoroughly immersive experience. That was particularly surp—rising since it’s really a movie featuring people (mostly men) talking to each other in a series of unremarkable rooms. Save for one virtuoso set piece — the build-up and aftermath of a successful atomic bomb test is Nolan at his best — what’s most impressive is how cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema makes those conversations utterly engaging. We’ve never seen Cillian Murphy’s piercing blue eyes do so much work in close-up.
Still, it’s an overall disjointed experience. The few featured women — Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, Florence Pugh as the Communist activist Jean Tatlock — are sketched thin, even by Nolan standards. And the movie would have benefitted from more insight into Oppenheimer’s thinking. It’s a surprisingly standard biopic, even though it’s three hours long and far more technical than any studio film this year.
At the very least, it would have been interesting to see Oppenheimer reckon more directly with the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We see him confront President Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) in a vain attempt to stop building nuclear weapons, and the film points to his very public stance against future bombs. But even those scenes feel self-serving.
At the end of the film, Oppenheimer finally comes to understand something many of his colleagues have been saying from the beginning. Nothing will be the same because of him. There is no peace now, only the undying specter of nuclear annihilation.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/oppenheimer-review-sympathy-for-the-destroyer-of-worlds-130052032.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – ‘Oppenheimer’ review: Sympathy for the destroyer of worlds
We all need to make excuses from time to time: Things don’t always go according to plan—including for reasons beyond our control. But for some people, making excuses is the norm, rather than an exception.
Source: LifeHacker – The Best Way to Respond to Someone Who Always Makes Excuses
Whether mowing the lawn or grilling and chilling at a backyard barbeque, music almost always enhances the experience. You can only do that with stellar speakers or excellent earbuds, which thanksfully, are currently discounted on Amazon.
Starting off, we have the Bose SoundLink Revolve+ ii, a portable speaker knocked down 24% to $249 even.
Source: Hot Hardware – Great Amazon Deals: Bose Soundlink Revolve 2, Quiet Comfort Buds, Galaxy Buds 2