Blue Origin's propulsion module lands in West Texas. (credit: Blue Origin)
Blue Origin has launched and landed its New Shepard booster four times, but the reusable rocket party may come to an end Wednesday morning (Note: Poor weather in West Texas forced the company to delay the test for one day). That's because the company plans an in-flight test of its launch abort system and will intentionally trigger it about 45 seconds after launch at an altitude of 16,000 feet. Such systems are designed to fire quickly and separate the crew capsule from the booster during an emergency.
Blue Origin flight test.
"The high-acceleration portion of the escape lasts less than two seconds, but by then the capsule will be hundreds of feet away and diverging quickly," Bezos wrote last month. "It will traverse twice through transonic velocities—the most difficult control region—during the acceleration burn and subsequent deceleration. The capsule will then coast, stabilized by reaction control thrusters, until it starts descending."
But the booster will likely not be so lucky. The propulsion module, powered by a single BE-3 engine, was not designed to survive an in-flight escape, as it will be slammed with 70,000 pounds of off-axis force and hot exhaust. At Max-Q, it is not clear whether the propulsion module will break apart. If it somehow survives, the booster will likely be placed in a museum. If not, it's expected to produce some fireworks upon impact with the Texas desert floor.
(credit: Louis Lanzano/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
4chan, the infamous message board whose users once labelled it "the asshole of the Internet," is nearly out of money and will have to take drastic action if it wants to survive, according to its new owner. Meanwhile, the notorious hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli has offered to help out.
The site, which hosts notoriously racist and sexist message boards, and which in the form of its /b/ board launched 1,000 unpleasant trolling campaigns, has long suffered money troubles, with users unwilling to subscribe and legitimate advertisers put off by unpalatable content. Its founder Christopher "Moot" Poole sold up in January 2015, to Hiroyuki Nisimura, the man who founded the board that inspired 4chan, Japan's almost equally unpleasant 2Channel.
In a post on Sunday, entitled "Winter is Coming," Nisimura wrote that he "had tried to keep 4chan as is. But I failed. I am sincerely sorry." He added:
Google last year released the OnHub Wi-Fi router. This year it has a new offering: Google Wifi (sic; although the wireless technology is properly written "Wi-Fi", Google's product is not).
The new access point is a little white cylinder. The main new feature? It's mesh-capable, so you can add new units around your home to expand your Wi-Fi coverage. It'll automatically pick which channels you use, to make sure it's always as fast as it can be. To that end, you can buy one of them for $129, or a 3-pack for $299. Preorders will start in November, shipping in December. You can join the waiting list here.
There's also a companion app to control the hotspots; you'll be able to control your kids' Wi-Fi access from the comfort of your phone.
Consoles like the Super Nintendo and even the Sony PlayStation were out of my reach when they first landed in 1991 and 1995, respectively, largely because of my youth and lack of free cash at both times. I'm sure I wasn't the only kid to look wistfully at consoles like those through department store windows and on the pages of Best Buy and Target Sunday circulars. "The Super Nintendo is here!" they shouted. Cold comfort for any kid whose parents made it very clear that they already had a "Nintendo."
Only one year after the PlayStation, the Nintendo 64 launched in 1996 and became the first console I could afford to buy with my own cash. This week marks exactly 20 years since that system's launch in the United States, and it's a milestone I'll never forget. My initial encounter with the N64 isn't etched in memory just because it coincided with the release of one of the greatest 3D platformers of all time or because it was the first system to ship with four-player modes as a default. For me, it marked the beginning of the rest of my life.
Say "graphics" seven times fast
Before any of my other odd jobs as a teenager (such as soda jerk and record store clerk), I got a job reviewing video games. I hadn't even become an editor of my school newspaper when the Dallas Morning News agreed to pay me $25 an article to review brand-new games (and syndicated those reviews nationally).
Enlarge / LeVar Burton, who played Lt. Cmdr. Geordi LaForge in Star Trek: The Next Generation, is voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. (credit: Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images News)
Over 100 prominent members of the Star Trek cast and crew have written an open letter against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The letter, which was posted to Facebook on Thursday, trumpets:
Star Trek has always offered a positive vision of the future, a vision of hope and optimism, and most importantly, a vision of inclusion, where people of all races are accorded equal respect and dignity, where individual beliefs and lifestyles are respected so long as they pose no threat to others. We cannot turn our backs on what is happening in the upcoming election. Never has there been a presidential candidate who stands in such complete opposition to the ideals of the Star Trek universe as Donald Trump. His election would take this country backward, perhaps disastrously. We need to elect a president who will move this country forward into the kind of future we all dream of: where personal differences are understood and accepted, where science overrules superstition, where people work together instead of against each other.
The letter goes on to say that voting Green or Libertarian, because the two major candidates are “equally flawed” is “illogical and inaccurate.”
Enlarge / VirnetX is litigating the road to riches in a patent lawsuit against Apple. (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)
An East Texas jury concluded late Friday that Apple must pay a patent troll $302.4 million in damages for infringing two patents connected to Apple's FaceTime communication application.
The verdict is the third in the long-running case in which two earlier verdicts were overturned—one on appeal and the other by the Tyler, Texas federal judge presiding over the 6-year-long litigation.
The latest outcome is certain to renew the same legal arguments that were made in the earlier cases: Apple, for one, has maintained all along that the evidence doesn't support infringement. VirnetX, as it did in the past and is now doing, is seeking more damages for what it says is "willful" infringement on Apple's part. What's more, in the previous litigation, the Nevada patent-holding company had asked the judge to shutter the Apple service at issue. Apple has maintained that such a demand was made "So that it can be used to extract a massive licensing fee."
Enlarge / Ed Harris is the Man in Black, a gamer who has discovered a hidden game within the immersive game of the wild west theme park Westworld.
Westworld is unlike anything you’ve seen before on television, and I don’t mean that in the sense of visual effects. The series takes two familiar sci-fi tropes—out-of-control robots and immersive gameworlds gone wrong—and builds a complex, plausible futuristic scenario around them. As a result, we get a rich, disturbing, intense story about how the evolution of storytelling is bound up with the birth of artificial life.
The new HBO series, debuting Oct. 2, is about an enormous wild west amusement park populated by robots indistinguishable from real people. Human "guests" can do whatever they want with the robot "hosts." Though it's not clear how far in the future the series is set, we do know that the park has been in operation for at least 30 years, during which time the robots have evolved from simple machines with small repertoires of phrases, into fully-interactive creatures who can learn, adapt, and even dream. Westworld, which looks like Monument Valley, is so big that even experienced players have never found its edges. The park's creator, Ford (Anthony Hopkins), is a roboticist with a serious Messiah complex who has secret plans for the park. Ford works closely with lead programmer Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), who also seems to have some off-the-books plans for the robots--he's been secretly analyzing the code running beautiful, kindly robot Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) during creepy late-night hacking sessions.
As the series opens, Ford has just released a software update that nobody realized was coming. The update is called "reverie," and it gives the robots a new set of gestures that make them appear to be staring off into space and dreaming. Though it adds to the robots' realism, it also has some unexplained side-effects that cause the robots to crash. So Bernard and his team, along with an ops crew led by Theresa (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and security chief Ashley (Luke Hemsworth), have to come in and clean up the mess. Of course it's not going to be easy, because Ford's update was a lot more than it seems. And it appears to be spreading like an intellectual virus from robot to robot.
Last week, security news site KrebsOnSecurity went dark for more than 24 hours following what was believed to be a record 620 gigabit-per-second denial of service attack brought on by an ensemble of routers, security cameras, or other so-called Internet of Things devices. Now, there's word of a similar attack on a French Web host that peaked at a staggering 1.1 terabits per second, more than 60 percent bigger.
The attacks were first reported on September 19 by Octave Klaba, the founder and CTO of OVH. The first one reached 1.1 Tbps while a follow-on was 901 Gbps. Then, last Friday, he reported more attacks that were in the same almost incomprehensible range. He said the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were delivered through a collection of hacked Internet-connected cameras and digital video recorders. With each one having the ability to bombard targets with 1 Mbps to 30 Mbps, he estimated the botnet had a capacity of 1.5 Tbps.
A new Ethernet standard that allows for up to 2.5Gbps over normal Cat 5e cables (the ones you probably have in your house) has been approved by the IEEE. The standard—formally known as IEEE 802.3bz-2016, 2.5G/5GBASE-T, or just 2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet—also allows for up to 5Gbps over Cat 6 cabling.
The new standard was specifically designed to bridge the copper-twisted-pair gap between Gigabit Ethernet (1Gbps), which is currently the fastest standard for conventional Cat 5e and Cat 6 cabling, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, which can do 10Gbps but requires special Cat 6a or 7 cabling. Rather impressively work only began on the new standard at the end of 2014, which gives you some idea of how quickly the powers that be wanted to push this through.
While Cat 6a and 7 are growing in popularity, the vast majority of homes, offices, and institutions use Cat 5e and Cat 6—and upgrading the cabling would be very expensive indeed. A wired 1Gbps connection is still fairly adequate for a single PC user, of course—but over the last few years, with the explosion of high-speed Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet is now one of the bottlenecks. For example, the top end of the 802.11ac spec eventually calls for a total aggregate capacity of around 6.5Gbps; even current consumer 802.11ac gear, which maxes out at around 1.3 or 1.6Gbps, is running up against the limits of GigE.
Enlarge / Looks like a great place for a chemistry lab. Now if only FedEx would deliver the raw materials. (credit: NASA)
Elon Musk is proposing a ton of audacious things to get to Mars before the 2020s are over. But perhaps the most striking feature of his plan is the simplest. He's not just sending people to Mars; he's planning on bringing them back.
At this point, every journey to Mars has been a one-way trip. NASA is only just now planning a rover for a 2020 launch that will gather samples for return to Earth—how we're going to get the small collection of samples back hasn't yet been specified. By contrast, Musk intends to return everything: the people, the ship, and presumably any souvenirs that clear customs. That intention is going to require radically rethinking the approach.
One of the key things that will have to change is what our hardware does once it gets there. So far, all our equipment has been designed to sample the chemistry that's present (though that will change on the 2020 rover—we'll have more on that in an upcoming story). Musk's plan envisions creating a chemical factory on the red planet, one that makes all the fuel needed to get back off the surface and return a ship to Earth.
What is Stream+? Other than a new, Twitch-specific currency that will be used to bet on Twitch streams, we're not entirely sure.
TwitchCon, the annual convention dedicated to its namesake's popular game-streaming service, kicked off on Thursday evening with an event hosted by Amazon Game Studios. There, the game publisher announced that Twitch will begin doling out a form of currency called "Stream+," which will debut in the upcoming sports-brawling multiplayer game Breakaway.
An Amazon Game Studios rep mentioned the currency while describing various ways the new game will "integrate directly" with Twitch (which makes a certain level of sense, since Amazon acquired Twitch in 2014). The reveal included a brief snippet of Breakaway action that confirmed viewers' ability to wager on matches and "earn Stream+ Coins by watching."
The reveal was otherwise scant on Stream+ details. Amazon didn't confirm exactly how the coins could be spent and what they would unlock, either within Breakaway or throughout the Twitch ecosystem, not to mention whether Stream+ currency could be bought, sold, or traded. Gambling watchdog groups will surely keep a careful eye on this implementation, especially in light of a major gambling scandal that dogged the Steam gaming marketplace. In that instance, enterprising users found workarounds to trade and monetize in-game currencies and items—and built significant wagering sites as a result.
Enlarge / What the view of Mars might look like from inside the Interplanetary Transport System. (credit: SpaceX)
Elon Musk finally did it. Fourteen years after founding SpaceX, and nine months after promising to reveal details about his plans to colonize Mars, the tech mogul made good on that promise Tuesday afternoon in Guadalajara, Mexico. Over the course of a 90-minute speech Musk, always a dreamer, shared his biggest and most ambitious dream with the world—how to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species.
And what mighty ambitions they are. The Interplanetary Transport System he unveiled could carry 100 people at a time to Mars. Contrast that to the Apollo program, which carried just two astronauts at a time to the surface of the nearby Moon, and only for brief sojourns. Moreover, Musk’s rocket that would lift all of those people and propellant into orbit would be nearly four times as powerful as the mighty Saturn V booster. Musk envisions a self-sustaining Mars colony with at least a million residents by the end of the century.
Beyond this, what really stood out about Musk’s speech on Tuesday was the naked baring of his soul. Considering his mannerisms, passion, and the utter seriousness of his convictions, it felt at times like the man's entire life had led him to that particular stage. It took courage to make the speech, to propose the greatest space adventure of all time. His ideas, his architecture for getting it done—they’re all out there now for anyone to criticize, second guess, and doubt.
With over 30 million players registered since its 2014 launch, Destiny is one of the most popular shooters on consoles today. Now it looks like PC players will be able to get in on the action with upcoming sequel Destiny 2, according to online reports.
The rumor got going yesterday with a NeoGAF poster citing "somebody that works at Activision" as confirming that PC support for the sequel was being communicated to Activision employees. That tidbit was then fleshed out by Kotaku's Jason Schreier, who says he heard about the PC plans "earlier this year" and cites "several sources" in confirming the information. Schreier seems well-positioned to know, too, as he previously wrote an in-depth report on Destiny's messy development history.
The reported addition of PC support will likely be aided by the fact that Activision and Bungie officially abandoned the last-generation consoles (i.e., Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) for Destiny's last Rise of Iron expansion. That likely means any sequel won't have to worry about scaling back the PC experience so it also works on console hardware that is over a decade old at this point. The upcoming launch of the PS4 Pro and Xbox's Project Scorpio should also ensure that the development team can target relatively high-end PCs alongside the console market.
Plex, a service for streaming video and other media from a home PC or NAS device, has teamed up with Amazon to help customers stream their content from the cloud.
Plex is a great tool for making movies, music, and photos available to just about any device, whether you're at home or traveling. But the home computer that holds your Plex content must be powered on and connected to the Internet in order for it to work. A power failure or Internet outage at home could thus leave a Plex user without any streaming content when they're traveling.
Plex Cloud, announced today, could solve that problem. "Plex Cloud eliminates the need to run your own local Plex Media Server and manage an always-on computer or NAS," the announcement said. "Let Amazon worry about nasty stuff like power failure, corruption, and data loss. It turns out they’re pretty good at that stuff!"
Enlarge / Mylan Inc. CEO Heather Breschtestifies during a hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee September 21, 2016 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Alex Wong)
The EpiPen profit figures that Heather Bresch, CEO of EpiPen maker Mylan, Inc., proudly displayed on a giant chart to the seething House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last week were misleading at best and a flat-out lie at worst, according to a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Bresch, who was called before the committee to explain steep price hikes of the life-saving devices, insisted that the company only makes $100 profit per two-pack of EpiPens. The list price for such a two pack now stands at $608. However, back in 2007, before Mylan bought the rights to the pens and raised the price 15 times, an EpiPen was priced at around just $50.
In her testimony, Bresch blamed the puzzlingly small profit on undefined costs and America’s complicated healthcare system. The committee, however, didn’t buy that—and rightly so.
The Linux kernel today faces an unprecedented safety crisis. Much like when Ralph Nader famously told the American public that their cars were "unsafe at any speed" back in 1965, numerous security developers told the 2016 Linux Security Summit in Toronto that the operating system needs a total rethink to keep it fit for purpose.
No longer the niche concern of years past, Linux today underpins the server farms that run the cloud, more than a billion Android phones, and not to mention the coming tsunami of grossly insecure devices that will be hitched to the Internet of Things. Today's world runs on Linux, and the security of its kernel is a single point of failure that will affect the safety and well-being of almost every human being on the planet in one way or another.
"Cars were designed to run but not to fail," Kees Cook, head of the Linux Kernel Self Protection Project, and a Google employee working on the future of IoT security, said at the summit. "Very comfortable while you're going down the road, but as soon as you crashed, everybody died."
Now it all makes perfect sense...
Finally, a video game that plays at my speed.
Monopoly is a gateway game.
If I had friends, I would play Rocket League with them just to see our friendships die!
