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Space

Blue Origin Rocket Exploded Thursday Night During Hot-Fire Test (cbsnews.com) 73

Spaceflight Now shared their video of the explosion, which the Orlando Sentinel describes as showing Blue Origin's rocket "become engulfed in flames. The fireball expands out and covers the entire launch pad as the fuselage of the rocket can be seen crumbling into the flames."

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said on X.com "It's too early to know the root cause but we're already working to find it. Very rough day, but we'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It's worth it." (SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted "Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly.")

It's unclear how this will impact future launches. "The rocket was destroyed," reports CBS News, "and as the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the erector-gantry used to move the New Glenn from its hangar to the pad and to raise it from horizontal to vertical. Likewise, one of two tall lightning towers was no longer visible." It was the first such on-pad explosion at the Cape since a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up on nearby pad 40 on Sept. 1, 2016... Blue Origin only has one New Glenn pad, the one that was damaged in the Thursday test. The New Glenn, which has launched three times, is a heavy lift rocket designed to compete head-to-head with SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. During New Glenn's most recent flight in April, an upper stage malfunction prevented a commercial internet satellite from reaching its planned orbit...

The New Glenn destroyed Thursday was to send 48 Leo internet satellites owned by Amazon into space [which were not on board for the hot-fire test]

Blue Origin posted on X.com that "Debris from our recent hotfire anomaly may wash ashore in the coming days/weeks. If you encounter any debris, do not touch or approach it for your safety."

"Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult..." NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman posted on X.com. "âWe will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader symbolset for sharing the news.

Comment Re:Can someone help explain "perfect" randomness? (Score 1) 140

You are heading down the right path.

A book that made things more clear for me is "Non uniform random variate generation" by Luc Devroye (https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~mascagni/Devroye.pdf).

The generation of different distributions can be done algorithmically, but the algorithms get to the core of the processes making the noise. E.G. 1/f noise can be made from summing many exponential decaying functions. Electrons falling in holes in silicon - same thing. So we have 1/f noise in silicon. The type of process determines the type of noise whether quantum electron events or rain or insects chirping.

While noise does emerge from quantum things, it also can emerge from higher level processes.

Comment Not True (Score 2) 140

Claims of perfect randomness from quantum physicists are always wrong.

1) The claims rely on some detector being 50/50 (they never are), always detecting individual events (they often see multiple or none) .
2) Randomness amplification is a subfield of entropy extraction and it cannot give you full entropy (aka perfect randomness).

Comment Re:Outsourcing (Score 2) 38

Yes. lf they need to do is hire a team of crack programmers and system architects and have them start work on replacing the systems. Keep them hired as a key department of the post office and they will maintain the system. If it's good they could even license it out to others.

I've seen this happen in other contexts. E.G. in a semiconductor firm, they designed their own tools. Then they made that a whole department and spun it out as one of the chip design tool vendors which is still around today.

If you just outsource it, you will get a product that serves the needs of the vendor, not the customer.

Comment They're Doomed (Score 1) 106

I've been using AI to write code recently. I figured I should give it a go.
Not reviewing and understanding and editing the output code is a recipe for disaster.

For example, in code for a cryptographic hash function there are padding rules to bring the data size to a multiple of the block size and add a length. So for example with SHA3, a minimum of 65 extra bits. If your data length mod the block size is 65 bits less than the block size, then add the pad bit, put the length at the end of the block and fill in between with zeroes.

If you are longer than that, then it all spills over into the next block and you add a block.

If your length exactly ends up fitting in the block size, then you add a whole extra block with just the padding bit and length and a bunch of zeroes.

The hash that claude spit out missed that last case, so creating a hard to find bug, where in one out of 512 bit sizes, the hash fails. If I had not spotted that by reviewing the code in detail, there would have been a catastrophic bug creating a security vulnerability and system failures in chips.

So read the code and fix it or be doomed.

Comment Wrong assumption in the article (Score 5, Interesting) 83

I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.

Science

Scientists Found a Way To Cool Quantum Computers Using Noise (sciencedaily.com) 7

Slashdot reader alternative_right writes: Quantum computers need extreme cold to work, but the very systems that keep them cold also create noise that can destroy fragile quantum information. Scientists in Sweden have now flipped that problem on its head by building a tiny quantum refrigerator that actually uses noise to drive cooling instead of fighting it. By carefully steering heat at unimaginably small scales, the device can act as a refrigerator, heat engine, or energy amplifier inside quantum circuits.

Comment Re: Damn! (Score 1) 151

>These employees produced valuable work

Rocksmith 2014 is/was a wonderful thing. It's still on Steam and available with all the different DLCs.
Rocksmith's current version is crap subscription nonsense with greatly reduced functionality and none of the good music available in Rocksmith 2014.

Their last good output wrt Rocksmith was 12 years ago. I don't hold any hope of them returning Rocksmith to its former glory.

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