The Financial Times reports: U.S. government scientists have achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the second time, a result that is set to fuel optimism that progress is being made towards the dream of limitless, zero-carbon power... "In an experiment conducted on July 30, we repeated ignition at NIF," the laboratory said. "As is our standard practice, we plan on reporting those results at upcoming scientific conferences and in peer-reviewed publications..."

Although many scientists believe fusion power stations are still decades away, the technology's potential is hard to ignore. Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce no long-lived radioactive waste and a small cup of hydrogen fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of years...

[T]he improved result at NIF, coming "only eight months" after the initial breakthrough, was a further sign that the pace of progress was increasing, said one of the people with knowledge of the results.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The necessity of multiple drafts may be an idea that's drilled into children's minds by teachers and parents, but in 2023 there's still a need to remind software engineers to Throw Away Your First Draft of Your Code. "The next time you start on a major project," advises Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya, "I want you to write code for a couple of days and then delete it all. Just throw it away. I'm serious. And you should probably have some of your best engineers doing this throwaway work. It's going to save you time in the long run."

While Tietz-Sokolskaya's advice echoes that of Ernest Hemingway ("the first draft of anything is shit"), do developers tend to scrap or ship their first drafts in the real world?

CNN tells the story of Sandra Shuster, who'd included an airtag with her daughter's $2,000 lacrosse kit on a flight to Denver (with a stop-over in Chicago's O'Hare airport): When they arrived at Denver after midnight, the bag wasn't on the belt. United representatives at Denver gave them a case number and told them the bag should arrive on the 8.30 a.m. flight from Chicago in just a few hours. When it didn't, Shuster called the toll-free number for lost baggage that she'd been given. "They said, 'Your bag's going to come in later today on one of two flights.' I said 'OK, great,' but it never came. So I called later that afternoon and they said 'Your bag is still in Baltimore,'" says Shuster.

There was just one problem: she already knew it wasn't in Baltimore. Three months earlier, Shuster had bought an AirTag — Apple's tracking devices — to know where her daughter's bag was... [T]he AirTag was showing as being at baggage reclaim at O'Hare. "I told them I could see it at Terminal 1 baggage reclaim in Chicago, and they said 'We have no record of it.' I asked them to call Chicago, and they said 'No, we're not allowed.' They said they'd put notes in the system and the baggage team would take care of it."
The airline had mistakenly attached another customer's baggage-claim number to the luggage — so when it arrived at the stop-over in Chicago, baggage handlers couldn't know its ultimate destination, and it was moved to the "reclaim" belt. There were several more communication misfires — but fortunately, Shuster had more than 30,000 unused air miles...

"I jumped on the plane, flew to Chicago, got to baggage claim, and it took them 30 seconds to give me my bag..." Shuster tells CNN. "What was difficult to comprehend was that it would have taken one call to Chicago to locate it, and nobody seemed able to do that... You can't tell me in this day and age, with all the technology available, that they can't figure this stuff out. Airlines need to do better."

United later refunded Shuster's air miles, along with an apology "for the inconvenience you experienced on your recent trip with United."

A Dungeons & Dragons expansion book included AI-generated artwork. Fans on Twitter spotted it before the book was even released (noting, among other things, a wolf with human feet). An embarrassed representative for Wizards of the Coast then tweeted out an announcement about new guidelines stating explicitly that "artists must refrain from using AI art generation as part of their creation process for developing D&D art." GeekWire reports: The artist in question, Ilya Shkipin, is a California-based painter, illustrator, and operator of an NFT marketplace, who has worked on projects for Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast since 2014. Shkipin took to Twitter himself on Friday, and acknowledged in several now-deleted tweets that he'd used AI tools to "polish" several original illustrations and concept sketches. As of Saturday morning, Shkipin had taken down his original tweets and announced that the illustrations for Glory of the Giants are "going to be reworked..."

While the physical book won't be out until August 15, the e-book is available now from Wizards' D&D Beyond digital storefront.
Wizards of the Coast emphasized this won't happen again. About this particular incident, they noted "We have worked with this artist since 2014 and he's put years of work into books we all love. While we weren't aware of the artist's choice to use AI in the creation process for these commissioned pieces, we have discussed with him, and he will not use AI for Wizards' work moving forward."

GeekWire adds that the latest D&D video game, Baldur's Gate 3, "went into its full launch period on Tuesday. Based on metrics such as its player population on Steam, BG3 has been an immediate success, with a high of over 709,000 people playing it concurrently on Saturday afternoon."

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike quotes this article from BleepingComputer: A team of researchers from British universities has trained a deep learning model that can steal data from keyboard keystrokes recorded using a microphone with an accuracy of 95%...

Such an attack severely affects the target's data security, as it could leak people's passwords, discussions, messages, or other sensitive information to malicious third parties. Moreover, contrary to other side-channel attacks that require special conditions and are subject to data rate and distance limitations, acoustic attacks have become much simpler due to the abundance of microphone-bearing devices that can achieve high-quality audio captures. This, combined with the rapid advancements in machine learning, makes sound-based side-channel attacks feasible and a lot more dangerous than previously anticipated.
The researchers achieved 95% accuracy from the smartphone recordings, 93% from Zoom recordings, and 91.7% from Skype.

The article suggests potential defenses against the attack might include white noise, "software-based keystroke audio filters," switching to password managers — and using biometric authentication.

Even Zoom is now telling its 8,400 employees to stop working remotely at least two days a week and return to the office. The policy applies to employees within 50 miles of a Zoom office ith a Zoom spokesperson calling this hybrid approach the "most effective".

Business Insider quips that Zoom making the move means "The remote work revolution is officially dead."

And earlier this week The Los Angeles Times argues that "After watching and waiting, some chaotic back-and-forth and a few false starts, the white-collar American workforce appears to be settling — for now — in a hybrid mode." Even as more corporations are moving to call workers back to the office, arguing it's better for preserving company culture and decision-making, few employers have required employees to work on-site five days a week. Most are like Meta and Los Angeles-based Farmers Group, which recently announced that most employees who had been working remotely will have to come in three days a week starting in September.

Some firms have backtracked in favor of a more flexible system, or put return-to-office plans on ice, because of worker resistance and other changes wrought by the pandemic... [M]any other companies have stayed silent on the issue of remote work, maintaining vague or largely unenforced policies as they wait to see where the struggle ends. More unions, including the guild at the Los Angeles Times, are wrestling with management over remote work, which has become a top labor issue. For all these reasons, the overall amount of work done from home has held remarkably steady this year at about 28%, according to monthly surveys of thousands of workers by WFH Research, a group including Stanford and the University of Chicago. That's way up from roughly 5% of work done at home before COVID-19.

And there are some signs that employers are giving workers greater flexibility in their work schedules and when they can work from home. In a nationwide survey conducted last month for The Times by polling firm Leger, 27% of full-time workers said their employers had become more lenient over the last year about working remotely. Only 15% said their employers got stricter. Most of the rest said there was no change. Leger's survey showed that 11% of full-time employees work 100% from home, and 31% work a hybrid schedule, with most saying they choose which days to come into the office. The remainder said that they work fully on company premises or that their jobs aren't compatible with at-home work. These results line up almost exactly with WFH data...

Rob Sadow, chief executive at Scoop Technologies, a firm specializing in flexible-work software and research, says the percentages of employers that are fully remote and fully in-office have both declined since the start of the year. What's grown in their place is a "structured" hybrid model in which employees and employers have essentially split the difference. "This two to three days a week is starting to feel like a pretty decent, happy medium," Sadow said. "Executives and employees are finding somewhat of a truce in terms of how much time is spent in the office and at home."
The article also points out that "Some employees have quit and moved to more remote-work friendly firms."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: This is straight out of science fiction. The technology is absolutely incredible..." says a woman who received an AI-powered bionic arm. "I'm just absolutely in awe of the technology and excited about the future prospects this will give me."

The short video clip (produced by the BBC) also features the woman's doctor explaining that "the top section is customized to fit...with electrodes there recording the unique pattern of movement, that then talk to a little computer inside the forearm that then, through AI, build data and record those movements to tell the arm what to do."

A GoFundMe campaign had raised £296,613 (about $378,121 USD) to purchase the bionic arm — and last week the grateful recipient shared a long-awaited status update. "It's here. It fits. It works...! 6 months after I first signed up in the clinic I have my bionic arm. State of the art, tailored to my body, the price of a very nice sports car. 24h in and I'm already putting it to good use. The feeling of freedom is unbeatable. Being able to carry things in 2 hands! Open a bottle! Give my husband a 2 arm hug!

"I wouldn't have been able to do this without you, you believed in me since the very beginning. You stood by me in my darkest hour. THANK YOU."

The Washington Post reports: California's newly empowered privacy regulators announced their first case Monday, a probe of the data practices of newer-generation cars that are often or always connected to the internet. The California Privacy Protection Agency said its enforcement division would review manufacturer's treatment of data collected from vehicles, including locations, smartphone connections and images from cameras.

The agency was established by a 2020 ballot initiative that toughened the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018. As of July 1, it can conduct operations to enforce Californians' right to learn what is being collected about them, the right to stop that information from being spread and the right to have it deleted...

When combined with web surfing habits and other internet data collated by brokers, movement tracking can paint a full portrait that includes a person's home, workplace, shopping habits, religious attendance and medical treatments. Insurance companies also want data on how quickly drivers brake ahead of problems on the road, along with other performance indicators, and they are willing to pay to get it.
The Post notes that data is beamed to business partners of automakers under "vague privacy policies."

A new analysis "shows that over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential is available along the U.S. coastline," capable of fulfilling up to 25% of U.S. energy demand in 2050. (And it could also add $1.8 trillion in economy-boosting investment, while employing up to 390,000 workers.)

This new analysis comes from Berkeley researchers, who worked with nonprofit clean energy research firm GridLab and climate policy think tank Energy Innovation, reports the Verge: The Biden administration has committed to halving the nation's emissions by the end of the decade and has plans to source electricity completely from carbon pollution-free energy by 2035. Adding to that urgency, U.S. electricity demand is forecast to nearly triple by 2050, according to the Berkeley report. On top of a growing economy, the clean energy transition means electrifying more vehicles and homes — all of which put more stress on the power grid unless more power supply comes online at a similar pace.

To meet that demand and hit its climate goals, the report says the U.S. has to add 27 gigawatts of offshore wind and 85 GW of land-based wind and solar each year between 2035 and 2050. That timeline might still seem far away, but it's a big escalation of the Biden administration's current goal of deploying 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030. Europe, with an electricity grid about 70% the size of the U.S., already has about as much offshore wind capacity as the Biden administration hopes to build up by the end of the decade. Right now, wind energy makes up just over 10% of the U.S. electricity mix, and nearly all of that comes from land-based turbines...

For now, the U.S. has just two small wind farms off the coasts of Rhode Island and Virginia. Construction started on the foundations for the nation's first commercial-scale wind farm off Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, in June... Project costs have gone up with higher interest rates and rising prices for key commodities like steel, Heatmap reports. That's led to power purchase agreements falling through for some projects in early development, including plans in Rhode Island for an 884-megawatt wind farm that alone would have added more than 20 times as much generation capacity as the U.S. has today from offshore wind. Developers are struggling to make projects profitable without passing costs on to consumers...

The study found a modest 2 to 3 percent increase in wholesale electricity costs with ambitious renewable energy deployment. But renewable energy costs have fallen so dramatically in the past that the researchers think those costs could wind up being smaller over time.
The report points out that wind energy complements solar, by producing the most wind energy right when demand is peaking (in the summertime on the West Coast, and during the winter on the East Coast).

In February of 1994 Jon "maddog" Hall interviewed a young Linus Torvalds (then just 24). Nearly three decades later — as Hall approaches his 73rd birthday — he's shared a long essay looking back, but also assessing today's controversy about Red Hat's licensing of RHEL. A (slightly- condensed] excerpt: [O]ver time some customers developed a pattern of purchasing a small number of RHEL systems, then using the "bug-for-bug" compatible version of Red Hat from some other distribution. This, of course, saved the customer money, however it also reduced the amount of revenue that Red Hat received for the same amount of work. This forced Red Hat to charge more for each license they sold, or lay off Red Hat employees, or not do projects they might have otherwise funded. So recently Red Hat/IBM made a business decision to limit their customers to those who would buy a license from them for every single system that would run RHEL and only distribute their source-code and the information necessary on how to build that distribution to those customers. Therefore the people who receive those binaries would receive the sources so they could fix bugs and extend the operating system as they wished.....this was, and is, the essence of the GPL.

Most, if not all, of the articles I have read have said something along the lines of "IBM/Red Hat seem to be following the GPL..but...but...but... the community! "

Which community? There are plenty of distributions for people who do not need the same level of engineering and support that IBM and Red Hat offer. Red Hat, and IBM, continue to send their changes for GPLed code "upstream" to flow down to all the other distributions. They continue to share ideas with the larger community. [...]

I now see a lot of people coming out of the woodwork and beating their breasts and saying how they are going to protect the investment of people who want to use RHEL for free [...] So far I have seen four different distributions saying that they will continue the production of "not RHEL", generating even more distributions for the average user to say "which one should I use"? If they really want to do this, why not just work together to produce one good one? Why not make their own distributions a RHEL competitor? How long will they keep beating their breasts when they find out that they can not make any money at doing it? SuSE said that they would invest ten million dollars in developing a competitor to RHEL. Fantastic! COMPETE. Create an enterprise competitor to Red Hat with the same business channels, world-wide support team, etc. etc. You will find it is not inexpensive to do that. Ten million may get you started.

My answer to all this? RHEL customers will have to decide what they want to do. I am sure that IBM and Red Hat hope that their customers will see the value of RHEL and the support that Red Hat/IBM and their channel partners provide for it. The rest of the customers who just want to buy one copy of RHEL and then run a "free" distribution on all their other systems no matter how it is created, well it seems that IBM does not want to do business with them anymore, so they will have to go to other suppliers who have enterprise capable distributions of Linux and who can tolerate that type of customer. [...]

I want to make sure people know that I do not have any hate for people and companies who set business conditions as long as they do not violate the licenses they are under. Business is business.

However I will point out that as "evil" as Red Hat and IBM have been portrayed in this business change there is no mention at all of all the companies that support Open Source "Permissive Licenses", which do not guarantee the sources to their end users, or offer only "Closed Source" Licenses....who do not allow and have never allowed clones to be made....these people and companies do not have any right to throw stones (and you know who you are).

Red Hat and IBM are making their sources available to all those who receive their binaries under contract. That is the GPL.

For all the researchers, students, hobbyists and people with little or no money, there are literally hundreds of distributions that they can choose, and many that run across other interesting architectures that RHEL does not even address.
Hall answered questions from Slashdot users in 2000 and again in 2013.

Further reading: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst answering questions from Slashdot readers in 2017.

"For the second time this year, Wells Fargo acknowledged that deposits were not showing up in customers' accounts," reports NBC News: In an emailed statement Friday morning, a Wells Fargo representative said the issue was affecting a "limited number of customers," and that "the vast majority" of instances had been resolved before noon, while the "few remaining" would be resolved soon. This week's incident mirrored one encountered by Wells Fargo customers in March, which the company then blamed on an unspecified "technical issue...."

Customers nationwide appeared to be affected by this week's outage. Jeani Cortez, a single, disabled, self-employed accountant and Alaska resident, says she was supposed to have paid her rent, gas, electric and internet payments for the month by now with funds she deposited Wednesday. She said she was told Friday by a Wells Fargo representative that she would not be able to access her deposit for another three to five business days. She'd earlier been told that Wells Fargo could send her a letter to give to her creditors; that too has not arrived.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: A judge has ordered criminal charges dropped against the final executive accused of lying about problems building two nuclear reactors in South Carolina that were abandoned without generating a watt of power. The judge tossed the charges Wednesday because ratepayers of the utility that lost billions of dollars on the project were improperly allowed on the grand jury that indicted Westinghouse Electric Co. executive Jeffrey Benjamin. But federal judge Mary Geiger Lewis also ruled that nothing is stopping prosecutors from properly seeking another indictment. "We're not going away," said assistant U.S. Attorney Winston Holliday, who said prosecutors are still reviewing the ruling to decide their next steps...

The project fell apart in 2017 after nearly a decade of work, when executives and regulators determined construction of the reactors was so hopelessly behind schedule they could not get nearly $2 billion of tax breaks needed to help pay for the work. SCANA contracted with Westinghouse to build the reactors. Prosecutors said Benjamin , who was in charge of major projects, knew of delays and cost overruns but lied to regulators, utility executives and others. The lies led to electric rate increases while keeping the price of SCANA's stock from plummeting...

Two former SCANA executives have been sentenced to federal prison after pleading guilty to their roles in lying to ratepayers, regulators and investors. Former CEO Kevin Marsh received two years while chief operating officer Stephen Byrne was sentenced to 15 months. Former Westinghouse project director Carl Churchman has pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents investigating the project's failure and is awaiting sentencing.