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Submission + - SpaceX Is Now Building a Raptor Engine a Day, NASA Says (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A senior NASA official said this week that SpaceX has done "very well" in working toward the development of a vehicle to land humans on the surface of the Moon, taking steps to address two of the space agency's biggest concerns. NASA selected SpaceX and Starship for its Human Landing System in April 2021. In some ways, this was the riskiest choice of NASA's options because Starship is a very large and technically advanced vehicle. However, because of the company's self-investment of billions of dollars into the project, SpaceX submitted the lowest bid, and from its previous work with SpaceX, NASA had confidence that the company would ultimately deliver.

Two of NASA's biggest technological development concerns were the new Raptor rocket engine and the transfer and storage of liquid oxygen and methane propellant in orbit, said Mark Kirasich, NASA's deputy associate administrator who oversees the development of Artemis missions to the Moon. During a subcommittee meeting of NASA's Advisory Council on Monday, however, Kirasich said SpaceX has made substantial progress in both areas. The Raptor rocket engine is crucial to Starship's success. Thirty-three of these Raptor 2 engines power the Super Heavy booster that serves as the vehicle's first stage, and six more are used by the Starship upper stage. For a successful lunar mission, these engines will need to re-light successfully on the surface of the Moon to carry astronauts back to orbit inside Starship. If the engines fail, the astronauts will probably die.

"SpaceX has moved very quickly on development," Kirasich said about Raptor. "We've seen them manufacture what was called Raptor 1.0. They have since upgraded to Raptor 2.0 that first of all increases performance and thrust and secondly reduces the amount of parts, reducing the amount of time to manufacture and test. They build these things very fast. Their goal was seven engines a week, and they hit that about a quarter ago. So they are now building seven engines a week."

Submission + - The Browser Company's Darin Fisher Thinks It's Time To Reinvent the Browser (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Darin Fisher has built a lot of web browsers. A lot of web browsers. He was a software engineer at Netscape early in his career, working on Navigator and then helping turn that app into Firefox with Mozilla. Then, he went to Google and spent 16 years building Chrome and ChromeOS into massively successful products. Last year, he left Google for Neeva, where he worked on ways to build a browser around the startup’s search engine. And now, he’s leaving Neeva to join The Browser Company and work on Arc, one of the hottest new browsers on the market. Arc, which has been in an invite-only beta for more than a year, is trying to rethink the whole browser UI. It has a sidebar instead of a row of tabs, offers a lot of personalization options, and is meant for people who live their computing life in a browser (which is increasingly most people). CEO Josh Miller often talks about building “the internet computer,” too, and using the browser as a way to make the internet more useful.

Fisher has been an advisor to The Browser Company for a while, but Monday is his first official day at the company as a software engineer. Ahead of his new gig, Fisher and I got on a call to talk about why he thinks browsers are due for a reinvention — and why he thinks a startup is the best place to do it. The answer starts with the browser’s defining feature: tabs. Fisher doesn’t hate tabs — in fact, he helped popularize them. But he hates that using a modern browser involves opening a million of them, not being able to find them again, and eventually just giving up and starting all over again. “I remember when tabbed browsing was novel,” Fisher says, “and helped people feel less cluttered because you don’t have as many windows.” But now, “even when I use Chrome,” Fisher says, “I get a bunch of clutter. At some point, I just say, ‘Forget it, I’m not even going to bother trying to sort through all these tabs. If it’s important, I’ll open it again.’” Browsers need better systems for helping you manage tabs, not just open more of them.

The best way to improve the browser, Fisher ultimately decided, is to just start from scratch. Arc is full of new ideas about how web browsers can work: it combines bookmarks and tabs into one app switcher-like concept; it makes it easy to search among your open tabs; it has built-in tools for taking notes and making shareable mini websites. The experience can be jarring because it’s so different, but Fisher says that’s part of what he’s excited about. “This is not stuff people haven’t talked about before,” he says, “but actually putting it together and focusing on it and thinking about the small steps that go a long way, I think that’s where there’s so much opportunity.” Fisher likes to compare a browser to an operating system, which matches with The Browser Company’s idea that Arc isn’t just a browser but rather an iOS-like system for the open web. “It has task management UI, it has UI for creating and starting a journey, but there’s so much more in between,” he says. What the iPhone did for native apps, Arc hopes to do for web apps. Fisher says he’s interested in improving the way files move around the internet, for instance, finding a better way than the constant downloading and uploading we all do all day. He likes that Arc has a picture-in-picture mode that works by default, pulling your YouTube video out when you switch tabs. All these make the web feel more connected and cohesive rather than just a bunch of tabs in a horizontal line.

Submission + - Air Force One deal has cost Boeing another $766 million (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Boeing lost $766 million in Q3 on the project to build Air Force One aircraft.
It increases Boeing's total losses on the two jets to $1.9 billion since the build began.
Boeing bears the cost of any delays under a deal struck with the Trump Administration.

All government contracts should be like this. Cost savings are yours to keep. Cost overruns are yours to eat.

Submission + - Hasbro Can Now 3D Print Your Face Onto a Star Wars Action Figure (cnn.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: "It wasn't until recently that two technologies came into play at once," Brian Chapman, Hasbro's head of global design and development tells CNN. "One is a very simple way to scan someone's face and head" — which can now be accomplished with a Hasbro mobile app (which also allows customers to select other customizations like specific costumes). "And then, a very affordable way to print that head in a one-off way" (so it can be affixed to the standard body of Hasbro's action figures). Imagine your face on Star Wars and Marvel action figures, as well as Power Rangers, Ghostbusters — and more.

CNN adds that Hasbro say it will not sell user face data, and will delete it after 60 days.

Submission + - Facebook Agrees to Massive Settlement for Data Privacy Class Action Lawsuit (apnews.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has granted preliminary approval of a $90 million settlement with Meta Platforms, parent company of Facebook, to resolve a long-running class action accusing Facebook of tracking its subscribers’ activities on non-Facebook websites – even while signed out of their Facebook accounts. The monetary component makes this the seventh-largest data privacy class action settlement ever to receive preliminary court approval.

Individuals who, between April 22, 2010, and September 25, 2011, inclusive, were Facebook users in the United States and visited non-Facebook websites that displayed the Facebook Like button, may be eligible for a payment from the settlement fund.

Email notices from the claims administrator, Angeion, have started to go out, and will continue in batches through July 15, 2022. Recipients of an email notice should note an ID and confirmation code in the top left corner, which should be use in submitting their claim. However, even those who do not receive an email notice are still permitted to file a claim, and the administrator will determine whether they are eligible.

Submission + - 70-Year-Old Cyberpunk: 'This Interview is a Mistake' (spikeartmagazine.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: He was the co-publisher of the first popular digital culture magazine, MONDO 2000, from 1989–1993. Now as R. U. Sirius approaches his 70th birthday, a San Francisco-based writer conducts a rollicking interview for the Berlin-based Spike Art Magazine. ("I wanted to speak with someone who had weathered the shakedown of history with art, humour, and a dose of healthy delusion. Or derision. Whatever arrived first...")

That interview itself was star-crossed. ("What came first, R.U.’s stroke or the Omicron surge? As I recovered from a bout of corona, R.U. fell ill with his own strain.. ") But eventually they did discuss the founding of that influential cyberculture magazine. (Editor Jude Milhon is credited with coining the word "cypherpunk" for an early crytography-friendly group co-founded by EFF pioneer John Gilmore.) Asked about the magazine's original vision, Sirius says "I was pretty much diverted by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson and their playful, hopeful futurisms, their whole shebang about evolutionary brain circuits being opened up by drugs and technology."


I needed something to get me out of bed at the end of the 1970s. I mean, punk was great – rock and roll was great – but it wasn’t inspiring any action. I remember my friends stole some giant lettering from a sign at a gas station and some of it hung behind the couch in our living room where we took whatever drugs were around and tossed glib nihilisms back and forth. The letters read “ROT”.... I couldn’t sink any deeper into that couch, so there was nowhere to go except up into outer space.

The surrealism and so forth were influences that travelled with me when I moved to California to create this new thing based on psychedelics, technology, and incorrigible irreverence that eventually became Mondo 2000.


It's a funny interview. ("The 'R.U. a Cyberpunk' page from an issue of Mondo is the only thing most people below a certain age have ever seen from the magazine and we were taking the piss out of ourselves....") They scrupulously avoid mentioning Mondo's undeniable influence on the early days of Wired. But eventually the conversation comes back around to that seminal question: whither cyberpunk?

Q: The internet, which was a prime source of Mondo subject matter, is home to many eyes, rabbit holes, and agents of algorithmic manipulation. Where is cyberpunk culture alive and well in our contemporary moment? Are you still invested and engaged with cyberpunk as a means of exploring radical possibilities and ideas...?

RUS: [T]here’s not really a cyberpunk movement... Surrealism was a movement for a number of years because an anguished control freak named André Breton maintained it in various formations. We didn’t have that person, and if we had, he or she or they probably would have been laughed out of the sandbox for the attempt....

I’ll remain influenced by playful spontaneity from ancient 20th-century moments not because of any dedication, but only because that’s probably the only way I was ever going to be able to write or create. I lack rigor and once declared it a sign of death.


And Sirius jokes at the end that "usually my attitude is that the world today is bloated with people opinionizing so, this interview is a mistake!"

Submission + - 'Reckless' Russian missile test blows up satellite, forcing ISS astronauts to ta (cnet.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: "Seven crew members aboard the International Space Station had to take emergency shelter in a spacecraft docked to the ISS on Monday because of a new, potentially dangerous debris field generated by a Russian anti-satellite test," reports CNET.

"The astronauts huddled inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon and Russian Soyuz spacecraft after a Russian missile exploded one of the nation's dead spy satellites over the weekend."

The anti-satellite test was condemned by a US State Department spokesperson on Monday. "The Russian Federation recklessly conducted a destructive satellite test of a direct ascent and anti-satellite missile against one of its own satellites," Ned Price told reporters.

The test, Price said, has created over 1,500 pieces of new junk in orbit that "will significantly increase the risk to astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station, as well as other human spaceflight activities."

CNN reports that the U.S. "strongly condemned a Russian anti-satellite test on Monday that forced crew members on the International Space Station to scramble into their spacecraft for safety, calling it "a reckless and dangerous act" and saying that it "won't tolerate" behavior that puts international interests at risk."

Comment Re:Any Windows (Score 1) 103

by gx5000 (#59539164) Attached to: Vladimir Putin 'Still Uses Obsolete Windows XP' Despite Hacking Risk
I was on the Team that launched it at MS Canada.
It was so Crap our calls dropped by 50%...98SE on the other hand....
The only people that had issues with ME were the starfish that didn't update their BIOS or used shit hardware.
As a tech the ability to rollback patches accumulations or just the registry was a godsend. We didn't switch out at home to XP until SP1 went through its 7th iteration, but sh*tting on ME is just such a Starfish move.

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