An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Residents of The Dalles, Oregon, are learning how much of their water Google's data centers have been using to cool the computers inside the cavernous buildings -- information that previously was deemed a trade secret. A lawsuit by the city on behalf of Google -- against Oregon's biggest newspaper, The Oregonian/OregonLive -- that sought to keep the water-use information confidential was dropped, the newspaper reported Thursday. City officials abandoned the 13-month legal fight and committed to release the company's water consumption in future years.

In an email, Google confirmed Thursday that its water use numbers would no longer be a trade secret. "It is one example of the importance of transparency, which we are aiming to increase ... which includes site-level water usage numbers for all our U.S. data center sites, including The Dalles," Google spokesperson Devon Smiley said. Google says (PDF) its data centers in the Oregon town consumed 274.5 million gallons (1 billion liters) of water last year. In a Nov. 21 blog posting, Google said that all of its global data centers consumed approximately 4.3 billion gallons (16.3 billion liters) of water in 2021, which it said is comparable to the water needed to irrigate and maintain 29 golf courses in the southwest U.S. each year. The Dalles Mayor Richard Mays said Google had previously insisted its water usage was a trade secret because the company was concerned about competitors knowing how it cools its servers, but then changed its position and agreed to release the water records. "That's why we backed off (the lawsuit)," Mays told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

The Oregonian/OregonLive, which had requested Google's records last year, said the case represents a major test of Oregon public records law. "This seemed to be a perfect example of a clash of two important storylines, both the expansion of big businesses and the public resource that they need to use," Therese Bottomly, editor of The Oregonian/OregonLive, was quoted as saying.

Google employees asked executives at an all-hands meeting whether the AI chatbot that's going viral represents a "missed opportunity" for the company. Google's Jeff Dean said the company has much more "reputational risk" in providing wrong information and thus is moving "more conservatively than a small startup." CNBC reports: Google employees are seeing all the buzz around ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that was released to the public at the end of November and quickly turned into a Twitter sensation. Some of them are wondering where Google is in the race to create sophisticated chatbots that can answer user queries. After all, Google's prime business is web search, and the company has long touted itself as a pioneer in AI. Google's conversation technology is called LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications.

At a recent all-hands meeting, employees raised concerns about the company's competitive edge in AI, given the sudden popularity of ChatGPT, which was launched by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based startup that's backed by Microsoft. "Is this a missed opportunity for Google, considering we've had Lamda for a while?" read one top-rated question that came up at last week's meeting. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Jeff Dean, the long-time head of Google's AI division, responded to the question by saying that the company has similar capabilities but that the cost if something goes wrong would be greater because people have to trust the answers they get from Google.

Pichai said at the meeting that the company has "a lot" planned in the space for 2023, and that "this is an area where we need to be bold and responsible so we have to balance that." Google, which has a market cap of over $1.2 trillion, doesn't have that luxury. Its technology has stayed largely in-house so far, Dean told employees, emphasizing that the company has much more "reputational risk" and is moving "more conservatively than a small startup." "We are absolutely looking to get these things out into real products and into things that are more prominently featuring the language model rather than under the covers, which is where we've been using them to date," Dean said. "But, it's super important we get this right." He went on to say "you can imagine for search-like applications, the factuality issues are really important and for other applications, bias and toxicity and safety issues are also paramount." Dean said the technology isn't where it needs to be for a broad rollout and that current publicly-available models have issues. Pichai said that 2023 will mark a "point of inflection" for the the way AI is used for conversations and in search. "We can dramatically evolve as well as ship new stuff," he said.

Three more UK universities have banned fossil fuel companies from recruiting students through their career services, with one citing the industry as a "fundamental barrier to a more just and sustainable world." From a report: The University of the Arts London, University of Bedfordshire, and Wrexham Glyndwr University join Birkbeck, University of London, which was the first to adopt a fossil-free careers service policy in September. The moves follow a campaign supported by the student-led group People & Planet, which is now active in dozens of universities. The group said universities have been "propping up the companies most responsible for destroying the planet," while the climate crisis was "the defining issue of most students' lifetimes." The campaign is backed by the National Union of Students and the Universities and College Union, which represents academics and support staff. "The approach supports future generations to make meaningful career decisions," said Lynda Powell, the executive director of operations at Wrexham Glyndwr University (WGU). "Through this we are supporting the development of a sustainable workforce for the future."

The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday sued to block Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of the video game publisher Activision Blizzard, charging that the massive deal would allow the Washington tech giant to suppress its competitors in gaming. Washington Post: The lawsuit represents the FTC's most significant effort to rein in consolidation in the tech industry since prominent tech critic Lina Khan (D) became the commission's chair and was expected to usher in a new era of antitrust enforcement characterized by a willingness to bring cases in court rather than pursue settlements with companies.

The FTC lawsuit against Microsoft could foil the company's ambitions to become a heavier hitter in gaming frontiers. Activision is the owner of massively popular titles like "Candy Crush" and "Call of Duty," and its acquisition could bolster Microsoft in its competition with Japanese console makers Nintendo and Sony. The commission voted on Thursday on a party-line vote to issue the lawsuit in administrative court, with the three Democrats in favor of the complaint and one Republican against it.

The United Nations' biodiversity chief says global talks under way in Montreal are the "last chance" to reverse the destruction of the natural world. From a report: "Biodiversity is the foundation of life. Without it, there is no life," Elizabeth Maruma Mrema told BBC Radio 4's Inside Science programme. But she is worried about the amount of work still needed for the 196 countries to reach an agreement. The Global Biodiversity Framework, if agreed, represents fundamental change. It is the nature equivalent of the Paris Agreement, an international treaty to limit global temperature rise and arrest the climate crisis.

"The targets in that [Global Biodiversity Framework] are a roadmap to, by 2030, reverse and halt the loss of biodiversity, which has reached rates unprecedented in the history of humankind" Ms Mrema said. The list of 20 targets includes quantifiable aims, such as a call for 30% of the Earth's land and sea to be conserved through the establishment of protected areas. But it also includes trickier political issues, such as protecting the rights and access of indigenous people to their territories. Indigenous communities are custodians of an estimated 85% of the world's biodiversity -- and where they have rights and access, it is significantly better protected from degradation and damage.

Telegram Premium has amassed over 1 million subscribers, less than six months after the popular instant messaging app launched the paid offering and began a serious effort to monetize the business. From a report: Pavel Durov shared the update on his Telegram channel Tuesday, calling the milestone "one of the most successful examples of a social media subscription plan ever launched." The subscription, however, still "represents just a fraction of Telegram's overall revenue," he shared in the same update, optimistically hoping that one day Premium will rake in just as much money as ads.

Amazon has reached a final deal with EU antitrust regulators over concerns its use of data undermined rivals, in a move that will close two of the most high-profile probes in Brussels. From a report: The US ecommerce group has committed to increasing the visibility of rival products by giving them equal treatment on Amazon's "buy box," which generates the majority of purchases on the site. It will also create an alternative featured offer for those buyers where speed of delivery is less important. The European Commission plans to announce the deal on December 20, according to four people with direct knowledge of the timing. However they warned the date could still change at the last minute.

The commitments, which are set to remain in force for five years, have been "market tested" with rivals and agreed with EU officials, these people said. "There's very little to discuss," a person with knowledge of the process said. The move represents a win for the EU as it will serve as a blueprint for the tech group's compliance with the new Digital Markets Act, a piece of legislation aimed at curbing the power of Big Tech. It also means Amazon will avoid formal charges of breaking EU law and a large fine of up to 10 per cent of global revenues.

"Twitter CEO Elon Musk turned to journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday to reveal the decision-making behind the platform's suppression of a 2020 article from the New York Post regarding Hunter Biden's laptop," reports Newsweek.

"Taibbi later deleted a tweet showing [former Twitter CEO] Jack Dorsey's email address," adds the Verge, covering reactions to Taibbi's thread — and the controversial events that the tweets described: At the time, it was not clear if the materials were genuine, and Twitter decided to ban links to or images of the Post's story, citing its policy on the distribution of hacked materials. The move was controversial even then, primarily among Republicans but also with speech advocates worried about Twitter's decision to block a news outlet. While Musk might be hoping we see documents showing Twitter's (largely former) staffers nefariously deciding to act in a way that helped now-President Joe Biden, the communications mostly show a team debating how to finalize and communicate a difficult moderation decision.
Taibbi himself tweeted that "Although several sources recalled hearing about a 'general' warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there's no evidence - that I've seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story."

More from the Verge: Meanwhile, Taibbi's handling of the emails — which seem to have been handed to him at Musk's direction, though he only refers to "sources at Twitter" — appears to have exposed personal email addresses for two high-profile leaders: Dorsey and Representative Ro Khanna. An email address that belongs to someone Taibbi identifies as Dorsey is included in one message, in which Dorsey forwards an article Taibbi wrote criticizing Twitter's handling of the Post story. Meanwhile, Khanna confirmed to The Verge that his personal Gmail address is included in another email, in which Khanna reaches out to criticize Twitter's decision to restrict the Post's story as well.

"As the congressman who represents Silicon Valley, I felt Twitter's actions were a violation of First Amendment principles so I raised those concerns," Khanna said in a statement to The Verge. "Our democracy can only thrive if we are open to a marketplace of ideas and engaging with people with whom we disagree."

The story also revealed the names of multiple Twitter employees who were in communications about the moderation decision. While it's not out of line for journalists to report on the involvement of public-facing individuals or major decision makers, that doesn't describe all of the people named in the leaked communications.... "I don't get why naming names is necessary. Seems dangerous," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote Friday in apparent reference to the leaks.... The Verge reached out to Taibbi for comment but didn't immediately hear back.

Twitter, which had its communications team dismantled during layoffs last month, also did not respond to a request for comment.
Wired adds: What did the world learn about Twitter's handling of the incident from the so-called Twitter Files? Not much. After all, Twitter reversed its decision two days later, and then-CEO Jack Dorsey said the moderation decision was "wrong."
In other news, "Twitter will start showing view count for all tweets," Elon Musk announced Friday, "just as view count is shown for all videos." And he shared other insights into his plans for Twitter's future.

"Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of reach. Negativity should & will get less reach than positivity."

The company behind the tether stablecoin has increasingly been lending its own coins to customers rather than selling them for hard currency upfront. The shift adds to risks that the company may not have enough liquid assets to pay redemptions in a crisis. From a report: Tether says it lends only to eligible customers and requires that borrowers post lots of "extremely liquid" collateral, which could be sold for dollars if borrowers default. These loans have appeared for several quarters in the financial reports that Tether shows on its website. In the most recent report, they reached $6.1 billion as of Sept. 30, or 9% of the company's total assets. They were $4.1 billion, or 5% of total assets, at the end of 2021.

Tether calls them "secured loans" and discloses little about the borrowers or the collateral accepted. Alex Welch, a Tether spokeswoman, confirmed that all of the secured loans listed in the reports were issued and denominated in tether. The company said the loans were short-term and that Tether holds the collateral. Tether, which is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, doesn't publish audited financial statements or a complete balance sheet, leaving outsiders with an incomplete picture of the company's financial health. "Tether's disclosures are limited to the information contained in the mentioned reports," Ms. Welch said. The rise in Tether's lending represents a broad risk to the crypto world. Stablecoins such as tether are anchors in the system. They are vital for trading many cryptocurrencies and are widely held by traders. The premise of tether -- and other stablecoins -- is that the issuer always will redeem one coin for $1. Issuers take pains to demonstrate they have ample funds available to do so. The company's reports show only U.S. dollar amounts for the loans and don't say the loans were made in tether tokens. The reports also say the loans were "fully collateralized by liquid assets."

The U.S. government "has banned approvals of new telecommunications equipment from China's Huawei Technologies and ZTE," reports CNN, "because they pose 'an unacceptable risk' to US national security." The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said on Friday it had adopted the final rules, which also bar the sale or import of equipment made by China's surveillance equipment maker Dahua Technology, video surveillance firm Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology and telecoms firm Hytera Communications.

The move represents Washington's latest crackdown on the Chinese tech giants amid fears that Beijing could use Chinese tech companies to spy on Americans.

"These new rules are an important part of our ongoing actions to protect the American people from national security threats involving telecommunications," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement.

"Waymo is one step closer to charging passengers for fully driverless rides in San Francisco," reports Engadget: The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has granted the company a Driverless Pilot permit, which allows it to pick up passengers in a test vehicle without a driver behind the wheel. It's only the second participant in the CPUC's Driverless Permit program, with Cruise being the first.

By securing the permit, Waymo now has the authority to offer driverless rides throughout San Francisco, portions of Daly City, as well as in portions of Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Sunnyvale. Its vehicles are allowed to go as fast as 65 miles per hour and can operate 24/7, but the company can't charge for the rides just yet. Waymo told Engadget that it will begin offering free rides without a driver to select members of the public in the coming weeks. To note, the company has been offering free driverless rides to the public in Phoenix since 2020.Â
In a statement the CPUC's Commissioner said that "We are seeing momentum build in this space and are working to assure the safe expansion of the driverless pilot program." The state agency says their permit "Represents a milestone for driverless passenger service, expanding the potential availability of driverless AV rides to more Californians and increasing opportunities for public engagement in the pilot."

But the agency also points out that Waymo "may not charge passengers for any rides in test AVs." (The ability to charge for driver-less rides requires a separate permit...)

Through 2020 America's professional lives "had taken on the overtones of a secular religion," argues a writer in the Washington Post, with jobs forming "a primary way to find meaning in the world and a crucial part of our identity.... Even precarious, low-paying gigs were valorized as 'hustle culture,' representing freedom to perform labor on our terms."

But then... Fast-forward to fall 2022. The number of people quitting, while down from the peak, remains at the highest level since the 1970s. White-collar workers don't want to give up working remotely. Low-paying sectors such as the hospitality industry can't find enough people willing to work for the wages on offer. Union organizing and strikes have been on an upswing.... [W]hat's increasingly clear is that the March 2020 decision to partially close down the American economy shattered Americans' dysfunctional, profoundly unequal relationship with work like nothing in decades. And even if there was great discomfort in a shutdown that severed almost every one of us from assumptions about how we earn a living, we also found an unexpected opportunity: to remake our relationship with the labor that fills our days....

All of it — the lockdowns, the disease, the sudden change in household functioning and how or whether we worked at all — amounted to a massive psychological shock, leading many to ask why labor looms so large in our psyches. "It really was an opportunity — an unwelcome opportunity — to take a look at the mad scramble that many of us have just assumed was normal," said Kate Shindle, who as president of the Actors' Equity Association represents a particularly hard-hit industry. Then, when the economy unexpectedly boomed back, Americans were poised to pivot. As many had recognized, it was one thing to seek meaning in work but another to see our lives subsumed by it — and for what? A less-than-adequate paycheck? A job that could literally kill you? "Maybe the poor safety net really kept people from analyzing the role of work in their lives," David Blustein, author of "The Importance of Work in an Age of Uncertainty" and a professor at Boston College's Lynch School of Education and Human Development, told me. "Maybe the American work ethic was a form of survival...."

Over and over, when people spoke to journalists, including me, about why they made changes in their professional lives since March 2020, they told us they liked receiving better wages when they switched employers. But even more, they wanted greater control over the terms of their labor.... An increased level of remote work, likely in a hybrid format, is almost certainly here to stay, says Nick Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, who has studied the topic for decades. Employees want it, technological advances continue to make it easier, and companies that forbid it completely are likely to find themselves at a disadvantage....

The past two and a half years brought immense upheaval, and we'll be struggling to process the resulting changes for years. But it's undeniable that some of these shifts were long overdue. Workers are highly unlikely to forget what we learned: namely, that our jobs are much more flexible than we thought.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: The swift collapse of the FTX crypto exchange has sparked an industry push among big rivals to publish proof of their reserves as a means to provide transparency into the assets on their platforms. With those efforts just getting underway, one firm, Crypto.com, has taken the proactive step of providing a preliminary set of disclosures -- sharing wallet addresses with the blockchain analysis firm Nansen to create a dashboard of nearly $3 billion of reserves and other assets. What that shows is just how heavily the mix of assets is skewed toward a meme-y token called shiba inu (SHIB), a digital asset built atop the Ethereum blockchain that was largely inspired by the joke token dogecoin (DOGE).

Like DOGE -- a key staple of billionaire Elon Musk's crypto schtick on Twitter -- the SHIB token is a highly volatile cryptocurrency whose primary use case is often considered to be speculation itself; it's traded for fast profits and yuks. Of the $2.88 billion in total assets in the wallets, roughly $558 million, or about 20%, are in SHIB. The holding ranks second only to the $872 million of bitcoin (BTC), the largest cryptocurrency by market value, which represents 31%. The amount exceeds the $487 million in ether (ETH), the second-biggest cryptocurrency, and dwarfs the $1.5 million in dogecoin (DOGE), Nansen data suggests. Crypto.com's large holding of SHIB is a "reflection of user interest/activity," Nansen data journalist Martin Lee told CoinDesk.

"In an ideal world, we'd want the best assets to be worth the most, but SHIB and DOGE both have extremely high market caps," he said. So it's "not super surprising that retail-heavy exchanges will have a higher concentration of such tokens. And regardless, as an exchange, your main source of revenue would likely be trading fees, so whether it's meme coins or more fundamentally sound assets, your business model is intact."

Further reading: Binance's CZ Slams Reports Binance's Reserves Are Full of Its Own Tokens

Intel's latest plan to ward off rivals from high-performance computing workloads involves a CPU with large stacks of high-bandwidth memory and new kinds of accelerators, plus its long-awaited datacenter GPU that will go head-to-head against Nvidia's most powerful chips. From a report: After multiple delays, the x86 giant on Wednesday formally introduced the new Xeon CPU family formerly known as Sapphire Rapids HBM and its new datacenter GPU better known as Ponte Vecchio. Now you will know them as the Intel Xeon CPU Max Series and the Intel Data Center GPU Max Series, respectively, which were among the bevy of details shared by Intel today, including performance comparisons. These chips, set to arrive in early 2023 alongside the vanilla 4th generation Xeon Scalable CPUs, have been a source of curiosity within the HPC community for years because they will power the US Department of Energy's long-delayed Aurora supercomputer, which is expected to become the country's second exascale supercomputer and, consequently, one of the world's fastest.

In a briefing with journalists, Jeff McVeigh, the head of Intel's Super Compute Group, said the Max name represents the company's desire to maximize the bandwidth, compute and other capabilities for a wide range of HPC applications, whose primary users include governments, research labs, and corporations. McVeigh did admit that Intel has fumbled in how long it took the company to commercialize these chips, but he tried to spin the blunders into a higher purpose. "We're always going to be pushing the envelope. Sometimes that causes us to maybe not achieve it, but we're doing that in service of helping our developers, helping the ecosystem to help solve [the world's] biggest challenges," he said. [...] The Xeon Max Series will pack up to 56 performance cores, which are based on the same Golden Cove microarchitecture features as Intel's 12th-Gen Core CPUs, which debuted last year. Like the vanilla Sapphire Rapids chips coming next year, these chips will support DDR5, PCIe 5.0 and Compute Express Link (CXL) 1.1, which will enable memory to be directly attached to the CPU over PCIe 5.0.

An anonymous reader shared this report from long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringley. "A Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) called OrangeDAO is cooperating with a small seed venture fund called Press Start Capital to establish the OrangeDAO X Press Start Cap Fellowship Program for new Web3 entrepreneurs.

"Successful applicants get $25,000 each plus 10 weeks of structured mentorship plus continued access to the more than 1200-member OrangeDAO network. In exchange, OrangeDAO and Press Start get to invest in the resulting companies, if any, produced by the class." Cringley likens it to the American tech startup accelerator Y Combinator — but on steroids.

Cringley also explains why he thinks this "middle class VC" model "will replicate and grow unconstrained," ultimately exporting itself from Silicon Valley to cities around the world. There are many DAOs around and hardly anybody understands them or knows what they are good for. Mainly they have seemed to be involved in the NFT market. But OrangeDAO is different. It has 1200+ members and every one of those members is a graduate of the Y Combinator startup accelerator. They are verified Y Combinator company founders, so they've all had similar entrepreneurial experiences and see business much the same way as a result. OrangeDAO seems to have big plans and to make those plans happen in August the DAO, itself, raised $80 million in venture capital, with their first use of that capital being these Fellowships.

I think this will change forever venture capital and the world economy.

It represents a new stage in the evolution of venture capital. In many senses it is the democratization of VC....

The DAO members all have similar backgrounds, similar values, and similar risk tolerances. THERE ARE MORE OF THEM, so they can do bigger deals. And — here's the important bit — THEY ARE ALL Y COMBINATOR-EDUCATED and connected globally through the blockchain. They not only know many of the same things, they have a sense of where this knowledge comes from and why it is useful.... In the YC-based DAO we have people who want the next generation of entrepreneurs to be even better-educated. It's not some egalitarian goal, either: they see it as key to success for the whole thing.

Smart people with good ideas will self-identify, be funded at a subsistence level to allow them to develop those ideas and prove their worth, then they can participate on a truly level playing field for the first time.... Gone is the Tycoon, gone is the professional VC who doesn't understand his tech, gone soon will be the angels (subsumed into the DAO model), and gone for the most part are the asshole VCs whom entrepreneurs grow to hate (not all of them, but a lot).

Done correctly, this model is essentially Meritocratic VC. If the idea is good, the market is ready, and the people know what they are doing, the capital will be there.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Yesterday, a company called Rewind AI announced a self-titled software product for Macs with Apple Silicon that reportedly keeps a highly compressed, searchable record of everything you do locally on your Mac and lets you "rewind" time to see it later. If you forget something you've "seen, said, or heard," Rewind wants to help you find it easily. Rewind AI claims its product stores all recording data locally on your machine and does not require cloud integration. Among its promises, Rewind will reportedly let you rewind Zoom meetings and pull information from them in a searchable form. In a video demo on Rewind.AI's site, the app opens when a user presses Command+Shift+Space. The search bar suggests typing "anything you've seen, said, or heard." It also shows a timeline at the bottom of the screen that represents previous actions in apps.

After searching for "tps reports," the video depicts a grid view of every time Rewind has encountered the phrase "tps reports" as audio or text in any app, including Zoom chats, text messages, emails, Slack conversations, and Word documents. It describes filtering the results by app -- and the ability to copy and paste from these past instances if necessary. Founded by Dan Siroker and Brett Bejcek, Rewind AI is composed of a small remote team located in various cities around the US. Portions of the company previously created Scribe, a precursor to Rewind that received some press attention in 2021. In an introductory blog post, Rewind AI co-founder Dan Siroker writes, "What if we could use technology to augment our memory the same way a hearing aid can augment our hearing?" Rewind AI provides few details about the app's back-end technology but describes "mind-boggling compression" that can reportedly compress recording data up to 3,750 times "without a major loss of quality," giving an example of 10.5GB of data squeezed down to just 2.8MB.

Ericsson subsidiary Vonage will pay $100 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that it created a web of obstacles for its customers to cancel the internet-based telephone service and charged unexpected termination fees. From a report: The agreement, filed in a federal court Thursday, represents the largest settlement of its kind in the FTC's enforcement push against companies that allegedly throw up high hurdles to customers seeking to cancel subscriptions or services. New Jersey-based Vonage will be required to obtain consumers' express consent for services and simplify its cancelation process. The cost of a subscription ranged from $5 to $50 a month for consumers, and potentially thousands a month for businesses, the FTC said. The commission said it received hundreds of complaints from consumers about Vonage's tactics.

Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II has had record sales of $800 million worldwide in sell-through following the first three days from its release. VentureBeat reports: The full title debuted on October 28 after hitting early-access release for the single-player campaign on October 20, breaking all previous three-day sales records since the franchise debuted in 2003. The blockbuster opening tops any of the biggest worldwide box office openings of 2022, surpassing Top Gun: Maverick, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness worldwide box office openings combined, Activision Blizzard announced (based on data from boxofficemojo.com). The company didn't say the exact number of copies sold, but it beat out the titles from the past two years as well as 2019's hit Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's opening.

Modern Warfare II also set a new franchise opening-weekend record as the No. 1 top-selling Call of Duty digital opening through its first three days. Developed by Infinity Ward (and nine other Activision studios), the release of Modern Warfare II represents a revival for the entertainment franchise, which will continue with the upcoming release of Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 on November 16. [...] Modern Warfare II's opening topped the previous five-day franchise record set in 2011 by Modern Warfare 3 in sell-through, to become the biggest opening ever in Call of Duty. That title sold $650 million in its opening five days, with the primary lower price of $60 compared to today's $70. Further reading:
Microsoft Promises Eternal Support for Call of Duty on PlayStation
Physical 'Copies' of the New Call of Duty Are Just Empty Discs

NASA obligated $2.04 billion to SpaceX in fiscal year 2022, which ended last month, according to new federal procurement data. For the first time, the amount paid by the space agency to SpaceX exceeds that paid to Boeing, which has long been the leading hardware provider to NASA. Boeing received $1.72 billion during the most recent fiscal year, based on data first reported by Aviation Week's Irene Klotz. Ars Technica reports: The California Institute of Technology, which manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory field center for NASA, remains the agency's No. 1 contractor, with $2.68 billion in funding. The academic institution is responsible for operating the California-based NASA field center and distributing funding for myriad robotic spacecraft missions such as Mars Perseverance and the Europa Clipper. On the one hand, the ascension of SpaceX to the No. 2 spot on NASA's contractor list represents a major shakeup in the order of things. For a long time, NASA's human spaceflight and exploration programs were dominated by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Aerojet, Northrop Grumman, and a handful of other traditional defense aerospace contractors.

However, it should come as no surprise that a company that has recently delivered the most services -- and, arguably, value -- to NASA should start to receive a large share of its contract awards. This has been most notable with SpaceX's performance on Commercial Crew, NASA's program to buy transportation services from private companies to bring its astronauts to and from the International Space Station. NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 to develop their spacecraft, paying Boeing about 60 percent more. At the time, it was widely believed that the traditional contractor, with this additional money, would deliver services sooner. But it was SpaceX that first flew crew to the space station in May 2020, and the company has since launched five operational missions to the orbiting laboratory. [...] Much of the funding increase for SpaceX in 2022, an increase of about $400 million over the previous year, appears to be driven by contracts for the Human Landing System as part of the Artemis Moon Program and the purchase of additional Crew Dragon missions to the space station. (Individual contracts can be found within the Federal Procurement Data System).

The Pew Research Center has released the latest iteration of its surveys of Americans' views of science and scientists. From a report: On the most basic level, they see a drop in the public's opinion of scientists since the height of the pandemic in 2020. But, as always, the situation is more complex when the numbers are examined closely. In general, there was a drop in trust of almost every occupation during that time period, and in the case of scientists, this largely represents a return to pre-pandemic popularity. The exception is that nearly everyone is less likely to say that scientists should get involved in policy decisions, with Republicans feeling especially strong in this regard.