SoylentNews

DannyB writes:

SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to launch record-breaking communications satellite

A report on the latest in a long line of SpaceX launches significantly delayed by customer payload readiness has been updated to confirm that the satellite in question will launch on Falcon Heavy, not Falcon 9.

Woo Hoo! I've been waiting to see another Falcon Heavy launch!

Hughes revealed that it had selected SpaceX to launch its Maxar-built Jupiter-3 geostationary communications satellite during an industry conference on March 21st, 2022. [....] Just six weeks later, manufacturer Maxar reported that the completion of Jupiter 3 – like many other Maxar spacecraft – had been delayed, pushing its launch to no earlier than (NET) "early 2023."

At the same time, Maxar revealed that Jupiter 3 – also known as Echostar 24 – was expected to weigh around 9.2 metric tons (~20,300 lb) at liftoff when that launch finally happens. That figure immediately raised some questions about which SpaceX rocket Hughes or Maxar had chosen to launch the immense satellite.

[....] At 9.2 tons, Jupiter 3 will leapfrog the world record for the largest commercial geostationary satellite ever launched by 30%. Barring the possibility of secret military spacecraft, it will likely be the heaviest spacecraft of any kind to reach geostationary orbit 35,785 km (22,236 miles) above Earth's surface.

[....] With its exceptional heft, a recoverable Falcon 9 launch may have only been able to loft Jupiter 3 around half the way to GTO from low Earth orbit (LEO). It was little surprise, then, to learn that Hughes and Maxar had actually selected SpaceX's far more capable Falcon Heavy rocket to launch the satellite. Even with full recovery of all three Falcon Heavy first-stage boosters, there's a good chance that the rocket would be able to launch Jupiter 3 most of or all the way to a nominal geostationary transfer orbit. If the center core is expended and the side boosters land at sea, Falcon Heavy would likely be able to launch Jupiter 3 to a highly supersynchronous GTO, meaning that the spacecraft's apogee would end up well above GEO.

[....] Falcon Heavy's Jupiter 3 mission won't beat the record for total payload to GTO in a single launch, held by Arianespace's Ariane 5 rocket after a 2021 mission to GTO launched two communications satellites weighing 10.27t, but it will be just one ton shy.

Looking at SpaceFlightNow.com's Launch Schedule it appears there will be several Falcon Heavy launches yet this year.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://hackaday.com/2022/05/17/book-teaches-gaming-math/

If we knew how much math goes into writing a video game, we might have paid more attention in math class. If you need a refresher, [Fletcher Dunn] and [Ian Parbery] have their book "3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development" available free online. The book was originally a paper book from 2011 with a 2002 first edition but those are out of print now. However, math is math, so regardless of the age of the book, it is worth a look. For now, the online version is a bunch of web pages, but we hear a PDF or E-reader version is forthcoming

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/05/netflix-speeds-up-plan-for-ad-supported-tier-says-it-may-debut-this-year/

Netflix has reportedly told employees it plans to roll out an ad-supported tier by the end of this year, sooner than expected. Additionally, Netflix's plan for an extra fee to fight password-sharing would roll out around the same time.

In a note to employees, "Netflix executives said that they were aiming to introduce the ad tier in the final three months of the year," according to a New York Times report on Tuesday. The memo "also said that they were planning to begin cracking down on password sharing among its subscriber base around the same time."

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings last month said the company plans to launch a lower-priced subscription tier with ads and will continue offering ad-free options. Hastings didn't seem to think the ad-supported tier would roll out in 2022, saying it is something "we're trying to figure out over the next year or two."

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Machine-learning systems require a huge number of correctly-labeled information samples to start getting good at prediction. What happens when the information is manipulated to poison the data?

For the past decade, artificial intelligence has been used to recognize faces, rate creditworthiness and predict the weather. At the same time, increasingly sophisticated hacks using stealthier methods have escalated. The combination of AI and cybersecurity was inevitable as both fields sought better tools and new uses for their technology. But there's a massive problem that threatens to undermine these efforts and could allow adversaries to bypass digital defenses undetected.

The danger is data poisoning: manipulating the information used to train machines offers a virtually untraceable method to get around AI-powered defenses. Many companies may not be ready to deal with escalating challenges. The global market for AI cybersecurity is already expected to triple by 2028 to $35 billion. Security providers and their clients may have to patch together multiple strategies to keep threats at bay.

[...] In a presentation at the HITCon security conference in Taipei last year, researchers Cheng Shin-ming and Tseng Ming-huei showed that backdoor code could fully bypass defenses by poisoning less than 0.7% of the data submitted to the machine-learning system. Not only does it mean that only a few malicious samples are needed, but it indicates that a machine-learning system can be rendered vulnerable even if it uses only a small amount of unverified open-source data.

[...] To stay safe, companies need to ensure their data is clean, but that means training their systems with fewer examples than they'd get with open source offerings. In machine learning, sample size matters.

Perhaps poisoning is something users do intentionally in an attempt to keep themselves safe?

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Previously
How to Stealthily Poison Neural Network Chips in the Supply Chain

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

ZDNet:

Amazon has announced that its two Australian-based solar farms are now up and running and delivering clean energy to the Australian grid.

The solar farms, which are based in regional New South Wales -- one in Gunnedah and the other in Suntop -- are expected to generate 392,000 MWh of renewable energy each year, which according to Amazon is equivalent to the annual usage of 63,000 Australian homes.

The company is also building a wind farm in the regional Victorian town of Hawkesdale. Amazon said once it is operational, the wind farm will boost the company's combined yearly renewable energy generation to 717,000 MWh -- or enough to power 115,000 Australian homes.

Does the path to sustainable energy lead through companies like Amazon supplying their own green sources?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

Billions of years ago, a series of volcanic eruptions broke loose on the moon, blanketing hundreds of thousands of square miles of the orb's surface in hot lava. Over the eons, that lava created the dark blotches, or maria, that give the face of the moon its familiar appearance today.

Now, new research from CU Boulder suggests that volcanoes may have left another lasting impact on the lunar surface: sheets of ice that dot the moon's poles and, in some places, could measure dozens or even hundreds of feet thick.
...
It's a potential bounty for future moon explorers who will need water to drink and process into rocket fuel, said study co-author Paul Hayne.

"It's possible that 5 or 10 meters below the surface, you have big sheets of ice," said Hayne, assistant professor in APS and LASP.

Is it better to drink the water there, or burn it?

Journal Reference:
Andrew X. Wilcoski et al, Polar Ice Accumulation from Volcanically Induced Transient Atmospheres on the Moon, The Planetary Science Journal (2022). DOI: 10.3847/PSJ/ac649c

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

For years China's censors have relied on a trusted tool kit to control the country's internet. They have deleted posts, suspended accounts, blocked keywords, and arrested the most outspoken.

Now they are trying a new trick: displaying social media users' locations beneath posts:

Authorities say the location tags, which are displayed automatically, will help unearth overseas disinformation campaigns intended to destabilize China. In practice, they have offered new fuel for pitched online battles that increasingly link Chinese citizens' locations with their national loyalty. Chinese people posting from overseas, and even from provinces deemed insufficiently patriotic, are now easily targeted by nationalist influencers, whose fans harass them or report their accounts.

The tags, based on a user's Internet Protocol, or I.P., address that can reveal where a person is located, were first applied to posts that mentioned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a topic authorities said was being manipulated with foreign propaganda. Now they are being expanded to most social media content, further chilling speech on a Chinese internet dominated by censorship and isolated from the world.

The move marks a new step in a decade-long push by Chinese officials to end anonymity online and exert a more perfect control over China's digital town squares.

[...] Those who appear to be getting online from abroad, even if they're just using a virtual private network or VPN that cloaks their location in China, are treated as foreign agitators and spies. After being reported by the trolls, some accounts are deleted by the platforms for violating "community regulations."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

MIT Technology Review:

Solar panels are basically synonymous with silicon. The material is used in about 95% of the panels in today's market. But silicon solar cells are limited in how much energy they can harness from the sun, and they are still relatively expensive to make.

For many, compounds called perovskites have long held promise as potentially cheaper, lighter, more efficient solar materials. But despite the excitement—and a flurry of startups to commercialize the technology—some experts caution that perovskite-based solar cells could still be nearly a decade away from having a significant commercial impact, if it ever happens.

[...] But despite the hype, there are a couple of key reasons why your next rooftop solar installation probably won't be powered by perovskites. At the top of the list: they're too fragile.

Perovskites are cheaper to make, but not nearly durable as silicon. Whoever can bridge that gap will change the world.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Nonprogrammers are building more of the world's software: A computer scientist explains 'no-code':

Traditional computer programming has a steep learning curve that requires learning a programming language, for example C/C++, Java or Python, just to build a simple application such as a calculator or Tic-tac-toe game. Programming also requires substantial debugging skills, which easily frustrates new learners. The study time, effort and experience needed often stop nonprogrammers from making software from scratch.

No-code is a way to program websites, mobile apps and games without using codes or scripts, or sets of commands. People readily learn from visual cues, which led to the development of "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) document and multimedia editors as early as the 1970s. WYSIWYG editors allow you to work in a document as it appears in finished form. The concept was extended to software development in the 1990s.

There are many no-code development platforms that allow both programmers and nonprogrammers to create software through drag-and-drop graphical user interfaces instead of traditional line-by-line coding. For example, a user can drag a label and drop it to a website. The no-code platform will show how the label looks and create the corresponding HTML code. No-code development platforms generally offer templates or modules that allow anyone to build apps.

[...] There are many current no-code website-building platforms such as Bubble, Wix, WordPress and GoogleSites that overcome the shortcomings of the early no-code website builders. Bubble allows users to design the interface by defining a workflow. A workflow is a series of actions triggered by an event. For instance, when a user clicks on the save button (the event), the current game status is saved to a file (the series of actions).

Netflix Cuts 150 US-based Jobs After Losing Subscribers

Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

Netflix has laid off about 150 staff, just a month after the entertainment giant said it was losing subscribers for the first time in a decade.

The redundancies, announced by the streaming service on Tuesday, will mainly affect its US office in California. They account for about 2% of its North American workforce.

Netflix said the job losses were due to the slump in the company's revenue.

The streaming service is battling an exodus of viewers this year.

Is Netflix losing subscribers to increased competition in streaming, to customers cutting costs in hard economic times, or to customer saturation and/or discontent with Netflix's library?

DannyB writes:

Tech war: China bets on open-source RISC-V for chip design to minimise potential damage from 'being cut off' by US sanctions

A growing number of Chinese chip design firms have adopted open-source RISC-V in their chip designs as an alternative to Intel's proprietary X86 and Arm's architecture, in a bid to minimise potential damage from US sanctions and to save on licensing fees.

[....] "[This] gives Chinese companies access to a global open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) ecosystem," said Stewart Randall, head of electronics and embedded software at consultancy Intralink. "So Chinese companies can have access to, and create, their own cores or chips based on it."

However, some industry experts said China's adoption of open-source RISC-V architecture would not shield them from all US sanction risks, as America still holds the trump card when it comes to electronic design automation (EDA) tools, the key software needed for chip design, as well as chip manufacturing technologies.

If you really want to create your own cores from scratch, without licensing anyone else's IP, is it truly possible to do so with RISC-V?

See Also:

Tech war: China bets on open-source RISC-V for chip design to minimise potential damage from 'being cut off' by US sanctions

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

FSR 2.0 can make Deathloop just about playable on a two-year-old laptop GPU.

There are two things to like about version 2.0 of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling tech, which finally began appearing in actual games late last week. The most important is that the quality of the upscaled image is dramatically better than in FSR version 1.0. The second is that FSR 2.0 is compatible with all kinds of GPUs, including not just AMD's but older GeForce GPUs that aren't compatible with Nvidia's proprietary deep learning super sampling (DLSS).

New testing from Tom's Hardware has also revealed another unlikely beneficiary: Intel's recent integrated GPUs. Using an Iris Xe laptop GPU in a Core i7-1165G7, FSR 2.0 was able to bump the average frame rates in a 720p version of Deathloop by around 16 percent, nudging it from just under 30 fps to just over 30 fps and helping to offset the low resolution with its built-in anti-aliasing. Not bad for a nearly two-year-old laptop GPU playing a demanding modern game.

[...] Game developers could choose to support FSR 2.0 over Nvidia's DLSS for the same reason: It provides good-enough results that cover a much broader range of GPU hardware from multiple manufacturers. [...]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

U.S. Space Force sees future demand for surveillance beyond Earth orbit

An international race back to the moon is already underway, with the United States, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates all at various stages of planning future lunar missions.

Growing activity in outer space beyond Earth orbit — known as xGEO or cislunar space — could turn this region into a contested domain as countries seek access to lunar resources and stake out areas of jurisdiction. As a result, the U.S. military will likely have to pay more attention to what's happening in xGEO, said Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of the U.S. Space Force's Space Operations Command.

"We are now seeing other actors go to the moon, go to lunar orbit and we do need to be concerned and interested in what they are doing there," Whiting said May 16 at a Mitchell Institute event.

Current sensors used by the military for space domain awareness were designed to track satellites in Earth orbits, at distances of 36,000 kilometers or closer, and not for cislunar space which extends out 385,000 kilometers and has different orbital trajectories. Scientists have pointed out that most activities in cislunar space are largely unmonitored and only self-reported.

Whiting noted that keeping watch of Earth orbit alone is "a huge challenge" but nevertheless the military has to prepare to extend its surveillance capabilities.

Original Submission

NPC-131072 writes:

From Universe Today

Each of us is, as it says in Max Ehrmann's famous poem "Desiderata", a child of the universe. It speaks metaphorically about our place in the cosmos, but it turns out to be a very literal truth. Our bodies contain the stuff of stars and galaxies, and that makes us children of the cosmos. To be more precise, we are carbon-based life forms. All life on Earth is based on the element carbon-12. It turns out this stuff is a critical gateway to life. So, how did the universe come up with enough of it to make you and me and all the life on our planet? Astrophysicists and nuclear physicists think they have an answer by using a supercomputer simulation of what happens to create carbon. As it turns out, it's not very easy.

The recipe for carbon-12 requires a pressure cooker and a lot of source material. The environment inside a star or during a stellar collision or an explosion provides the pressure cooker. The ingredients inside are helium-4 atoms and a theoretically forbidden nucleus of something called beryllium-8 (8Be). Put them all together and eventually, you get carbon-12. Sounds simple, right?

Well, not exactly. There's no way to replicate this recipe in the lab to test it and prove the process. That's because you need temperatures and pressures that exist only inside stars. To understand why we can't reproduce the birth of carbon, here's a simple outline of a complex process that astrophysicists think is happening.

See also:
On the Origin of Life's Most Crucial Isotope
Researchers reveal the origin story for carbon-12, a building block for life

Journal Reference:
Otsuka, T., Abe, T., Yoshida, T. et al. α-Clustering in atomic nuclei from first principles with statistical learning and the Hoyle state character [open] Nat Commun 13, 2234 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29582-0

Original Submission

NASA, Boeing Ready for Long-Delayed, High-Stakes Starliner Test Flight

takyon writes:

NASA, Boeing ready for long-delayed, high-stakes Starliner test flight

Running years late, Boeing's Starliner crew capsule program is poised for a crucial unpiloted test flight to the International Space Station set for launch Thursday, a do-over of an abbreviated 2019 demo mission that has cost the aerospace contractor nearly $600 million.

The Starliner crew capsule is scheduled for liftoff on the Orbital Flight Test 2, or OFT-2 mission, from Cape Canaveral at 6:54 p.m. EDT (2254 GMT) Thursday on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.

ULA, Boeing, and NASA, which oversees the Starliner commercial crew contract, gave a green light Tuesday to proceed with final launch preparations. Managers convened for a launch readiness review and gave a "go" to press on with the mission.

The review "went really well," said Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager. "It was short. It was very clean. There are really no issues that ULA, Boeing, or NASA are working for the launch coming up."

Boeing Starliner Nears Launch As ISS Astronauts Work on Space Botany and Human Research

Phoenix666 writes:

SciTechDaily:

The International Space Station (ISS) is preparing for the targeted arrival of Boeing's Starliner crew ship on the company's Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) mission. Meanwhile, the Expedition 67 crew is continuing its ongoing life science research while maintaining orbital lab systems.

Weather forecasters anticipate a 70% likelihood of favorable weather when Boeing's OFT-2 mission is scheduled to launch at 6:54 p.m. EDT (3:54 p.m. PDT) on Thursday. The Starliner spacecraft will lift off atop the Atlas-V rocket from United Launch Alliance at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Starliner will take a 24-hour automated trip to the station where it will dock to the Harmony module's forward port for five to 10 days of cargo and test operations.

The mission will be carrying materials for the station's botany experiments.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2