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hubie writes:

New research looks at near-death experiences and people's attitudes to work:

Singer-songwriter Aysanabee was snowshoeing across a frozen lake in remote northern Ontario over a decade ago, when the ice gave way beneath him, plunging him into frigid waters.

[...] He eventually managed to pull himself back onto solid ground, where he started a small fire to warm up and dry off. On the long walk back to camp, he had time to reflect on how close he came to death — and what he wanted to do with this second chance.

"Then, three months later, I bought a one-way ticket to Toronto to go do music," he said.

At the University of Guelph, Jamie Gruman and his research team recently interviewed 14 people who suffered near-death experiences, examining the impact on their work and careers. Published in the Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion in April, their research showed that survivors gained new insights, from a greater interest in spirituality to a belief that everyone is born equal, and here for a reason.

"Specifically as a result of those things, the insights and the personal transformations, work often became much less important to people," said Gruman, a professor of organizational behaviour at Guelph University.

[...] Gruman said that what people want from their work boils down to three things: economic security, meaningful work that allows them to grow and develop, and high-quality relationships.

But for the study participants who had come close to death, that changed.

"They all completely lost interest in making money and any external measures of success," he said.

"They didn't want big houses and cars and boats. They didn't want to be the executive vice president. They didn't want to get rich."

By contrast, the desire for meaningful work and strong workplace relationships skyrocketed, he said. That led some participants to change jobs, or even completely change careers.

Others were able to find what they needed by rethinking how they approached their work, Gruman said, giving the example of a teacher who "didn't really like teaching."

After her near-death experience, "she considered herself now to be a teacher in the school of life," he said.

Like Aysanabee, a brush with death taught the participants a lesson about time.

"They decided, 'Look, you know, my time here is limited, so let me make a move. And do something that speaks to my soul,'" Gruman said.
"Teaching math and science was just incidental to teaching students about the importance of treating people well and living well."

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.51327/UKWD3742 [Referenced in the body of TFA]

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_{Processed by jelizondo}

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The OSA was passed in 2023, however, specific child-safety duties and codes for online sites were finalised earlier this year. 

The UK internet and telecoms regulator Ofcom has opened nine new investigations into websites for potentially breaching the country’s Online Safety Act (OSA).

Of the nine, First Time Videos, a pornography website, will be probed over possibly failing to protect children from accessing mature content through effective age assurance methods.

“Robust” age checks under the OSA mandate that websites that allow porn and other harmful content must make sure children cannot access it.

Age verification and estimation needs to be “highly effective” under the law. According to the regulator, First Time Videos appears not to have taken the legally required steps to ensure age assurance.

While online discussion board 4chan will be investigated for potentially failing to respond to Ofcom’s legal requests for information and to conduct illegal content risk assessments on its website.

4chan’s provider received a formal information notice from the regulator in April this year, which it has not yet responded to, the regulator said.

Ofcom is also investigating seven file-sharing websites, including Krakenfiles, Im.ge and Yolobit, over whether they failed to protect UK users from encountering illegal content and activity such as child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

The telecoms regulator opened an enforcement programme earlier this year, assessing measures that file-sharing websites have taken to protect users from CSAM.

It sent a request for information to the sites in April, and has not received a response from any of the seven file-sharing sites.

[...] From the end of July, search websites, or websites were users interact with each other’s content, need to start implementing safety measures to protect children from harmful material, including content that promotes suicide, self-harm, eating disorders or dangerous challenges.

Earlier this year, Ofcom fined OnlyFans’ operator £1.05m for failing to provide accurate information about the age assurance measures it had in place on the adult-only platform.

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quietus writes:

The President of the United States has declared that the 17 million inhabitants of the capital city of a country should immediately evacuate.

Republican Congressman (and engineer) Thomas Massie (Kentucky) has stated that he will introduce a war powers resolution today, Tuesday, to prevent the President of the United States going to war without first consulting Congress.

"This is not our war. But if it were, Congress must decide such matters according to our Constitution."

[Editor's Comment: This has been released with significant reservations. The departure of Trump from the G7 was accompanied with a statement that said "it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire. Much bigger than that." Of course, this can be read in 2 different ways. It is possible that Iran is prepared to surrender or the US might be taking its own action in support of Israel. We would welcome your comments.--JR]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Solar Orbiter isn't the first spacecraft to study the sun's poles—but it's the first to send back photographs:

We Earthlings see the sun every day of our lives—but gaining a truly new view of our star is a rare and precious thing. So count your lucky stars: for the first time in history, scientists have photographed one of the sun's elusive poles.

The images come courtesy of a spacecraft called Solar Orbiter. Led by the European Space Agency (ESA) with contributions from NASA, Solar Orbiter launched in February 2020 and has been monitoring our home star since November 2021. But the mission is only now beginning its most intriguing work: studying the poles of the sun.

From Earth and spacecraft alike, our view of the sun has been biased. "We've had a good view of centermost part of the sun's disk," says Daniel Müller, a heliophysicist and project scientist for the mission. "But the poles are effectively not visible because we always see them almost exactly edge-on."

We began getting a better perspective earlier this year, when Solar Orbiter zipped past Venus in a carefully choreographed move that pulled the probe out of the solar system's ecliptic, the plane that broadly passes through the planets' orbits and the sun's equator. (The new views show the sun's south pole and were captured in March. The spacecraft flew over the north pole in late April, Müller says, but Solar Orbiter is still in the process of beaming that data back to Earth.)

Leaving the ecliptic is a costly, fuel-expensive maneuver for spacecraft, but it's where Solar Orbiter excels: By the end of the mission, the spacecraft's orbit will be tilted 33 degrees with respect to the ecliptic. That tilted orbit is what allows Solar Orbiter to garner unprecedented views of the sun's poles.

For scientists, the new view is priceless because these poles aren't just geographic poles; they're also magnetic poles—of sorts. The sun is a massive swirl of plasma that produces then erases a magnetic field. This is what drives the 11-year solar activity cycle.

[...] Most of the spacecraft's observations won't reach Earth until this autumn. But ESA has released initial looks from three different instruments onboard Solar Orbiter, each of which lets scientists glimpse different phenomena.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

What does the future of the internet look like? If AI firms get their way, the once-open web could be fractured into digital silos dominated by commercial AI models, leaving hobbyists and small businesses behind. To prevent this, a team of grassroots researchers is planning to fight back and ensure an open approach to AI.

At the heart of this battle is the concept of an AI “agent”, a piece of software that browses the web and interacts with websites according to the instructions of a human user – for example, planning and booking a holiday. Many people see agents as the next evolution of services like ChatGPT, but getting them to work is proving tricky. That is because the web was built for human use, and developers are realising that AI agents need specialised protocols to better interact with online data, services and each other.

“The idea is to build infrastructure so there’s a way for software-like bots, which we call AI agents, to communicate with each other,” says Catherine Flick at the University of Staffordshire, UK.

Several competing solutions to this problem have already been developed. For example, Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, has developed the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which standardises how AI models connect to different data sources and tools. In April, Google announced its own version of such a concept, the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol.

[...] But because these protocols are coming out of big tech labs, there are concerns that the inventors of the winning protocol could exert their influence to benefit their business, rather than the greater good. MCP requires a central server to oversee connections, while A2A is built around the assumption of a catalogue of approved agents working together, rather than a free-for-all.

“We don’t want the ‘agent internet’ to become another ‘data silo alliance’,” says Gaowei Chang. He chairs the AI Agent Protocol Group, which was established in May as part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards organisation, and says it is essential that all voices are heard in developing this new layer of the internet. “If we truly believe AI is an important technology that will change human society, then we need an open, neutral community to drive protocol design, ensuring its future belongs to everyone, not just a few companies,” he says.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Recent geopolitical developments and shifts in demand are causing TSMC to rebalance its investment strategy. The company has responded to growing pressure from the Trump administration to onshore its manufacturing by accelerating the construction timelines for its upcoming U.S. fabs by as much as six months. Conversely, in other parts of the world, a TSMC fab in Japan is now underperforming, and a second under construction is facing delays. A contracting German auto sector may slow further TSMC investments in Europe, according to a report by Digitimes.

However, while U.S. investment from TSMC is certainly ramping up amidst growing demand for chips, Taiwan remains the company’s heartland, with four of the current nine under-construction new fabrication plants being based in the East-Asian territory. This underlines the continued importance of U.S. strategic initiatives in the region, considering ongoing posturing from the ruling Chinese party about Taiwanese reunification.

TSMC has been a prolific fab-plant builder and investor in its global operations for years, consistently building multiple new chip manufacturing facilities every year. In 2025, it listed a total of nine new facilities as under construction (though some began in 2024 and others are actually starting operation, rather than starting construction).

The Fab 21 site near Phoenix, Arizona, is listed as two separate facilities, and it will produce different TSMC silicon. The N3 plant is in the equipping phase, while the A16 and N2 process production facility entered construction in April this year. That construction is now expected to accelerate, with TSMC saying it has brought its completion date forward by six months.

As part of this initiative, TSMC is investing a further $100 billion in American fabrication, bringing its total investment into the U.S to a total of $165 billion, which was announced in Early March. These will come online over the next few years, allowing for the US-native production of more advanced process nodes by 2030.

fliptop writes:

Newspaper could join legacy media brands in embracing newsletter platform:

The Washington Post has held talks with Substack about hosting pieces by its writers, the site's co-founder has said, as a host of legacy media brands embrace the newsletter platform in the battle for readers.

In an interview with the Guardian, Substack's Hamish McKenzie said he had spoken to the Post about its plans to widen the types of opinion pieces on its website.

He said there had been a "change in mindset" from traditional media, which once viewed Substack with suspicion. He said many now saw the platform as an opportunity to adapt to what he described as "the most significant media disruption since the printing press".

[...] Substack has become increasingly influential since its launch in 2017. It allows anyone to publish and distribute digital content, primarily through newsletters, and charge a subscription. It has also been branching out into podcasts and video.

[...] McKenzie said Substack was trying to find new workable models for media amid the struggles of traditional outlets to hold on to rapidly fragmenting audiences. "It's not a problem with demand for quality journalism," he said. "It's a problem with the business model and so there has to be a reinvention. We're almost at the point where the fire has razed through the forest and there are a few trees still standing. It's time to replant the forest. We're living through the most significant media disruption since the printing press."

Originally spotted on The Honest Broker.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Is this admission a sign of what Beijing wants?

Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei has admitted that its Ascend chip family is not as powerful as Washington thinks. As reported by its parent publication, Global Times, Zhengfei said this during an interview with the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The story itself was published on the front page of the newspaper on June 10, 2025, reflecting the importance of what the Huawei CEO said to the party and to state policy.

The second question the interviewer asked Zhengfei was about the U.S.’s crackdown on Huawei’s Ascend chips that allegedly violate export control and its impact on the company. “There are many companies in China making chips, and many are doing well; Huawei is just one of them. The U.S. has exaggerated Huawei’s achievements — the company isn’t that powerful yet,” said Ren. “We need to work hard to live up to their evaluations. Our single chips still lag behind the U.S. by a generation.”

This is a massive admission for a Chinese company that’s one of the key players in China’s ambition of global technological dominance; more so that it was done right on the front page of the CPC’s primary mouthpiece. Given that the People’s Daily is directly controlled by the party (not by the Chinese government), it’s often considered a tool that helps shape public opinion, share party policies, and even be used to gauge domestic feedback and the reaction of the wider international community before Beijing implements official changes.

China has been adamant for years that the U.S.’s bans on its technological sector won’t affect its progress, with China’s president telling the Dutch PM last year that it does not need ASML. However, no country is an island — and even if China does not or could not export its goods to the U.S., it still needs an international market to ship its goods and services to. Aside from that, this interview is a rare event where Beijing is strategically showing vulnerability, especially as the restriction set by the White House on the Huawei Ascend processors seems to have far-reaching consequences going beyond the borders of the United States and its allies.

[...] This isn’t to say that China doesn’t have an ace up its sleeve. The country is one of the biggest suppliers of rare earth metals needed for chip making, and it has restricted its exports as a response to Trump’s tariffs. Without them, the semiconductor supply chain would hit a snag, making it difficult, if not impossible, for fabs to continue making chips at current cost. Nevertheless, the country has recently started easing these export limits for domestic and European chip firms. It could be that China is willing to make a major concession, like giving U.S. companies access to its rare earths once again, in exchange for Washington not sanctioning Huawei’s customers.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Preserved beneath the ice sheet's crushing weight, the land remained unchanged since long before glaciation began:

Beneath the thick ice of East Antarctica lies a hidden world—untouched for over 34 million years. This frozen expanse, more than 10 million square kilometers wide, has long concealed a forgotten landscape. Now, using cutting-edge satellite tools, researchers have pulled back the curtain on a time when Antarctica teemed with life.

A team led by Stewart Jamieson at Durham University made the discovery with help from RADARSAT, a Canadian satellite system. The technology allowed them to detect small changes in the ice surface, revealing the shape of the land buried below. What they found was extraordinary: an ancient river-carved terrain about the size of Wales, locked under nearly two kilometers of ice.

"It's like uncovering a time capsule," Jamieson said. The untouched condition of the landscape points to its extreme age. Preserved beneath the ice sheet's crushing weight, the land remained unchanged since long before glaciation began. This hidden world dates back to a period when Antarctica was not the icy desert we know today.

Back then, the continent was part of Gondwana—a supercontinent shared with Africa, South America, and Australia. Instead of ice, Antarctica featured flowing rivers, forests, and roaming dinosaurs. That changed about 20 million years ago when glaciers took hold, freezing the region's history beneath a growing sheet of ice.

The ancient landscape now uncovered is more than a prehistoric curiosity. It helps scientists understand how Antarctica has changed over millions of years. These findings could also shed light on how the ice sheet might respond to rising global temperatures in the future.

The research also opens a new window into how rivers once shaped the bedrock before the climate shifted. It suggests that massive ice coverage can preserve entire ecosystems in place, offering a rare glimpse into ancient environments that no longer exist. The survival of these features helps scientists map how Earth's surface responds to extreme changes in climate.

With every pass of the satellite, new details emerged. What started as faint surface cues turned into a clear picture of valleys, ridges, and channels below. As technology improves, more hidden corners of the Earth's past may be revealed. But for now, this glimpse beneath the Antarctic ice connects us to a greener, wilder world long gone—but not forgotten.

"We've had a longtime interest in, effectively, the shape of the land beneath the ice sheet," Jamieson said. "The implication is that this must be a very old landscape carved by rivers before the ice sheet itself grew."

slon writes:

from https://news.mit.edu/2025/photonic-processor-could-streamline-6g-wireless-signal-processing-0611

As more connected devices demand an increasing amount of bandwidth for tasks like teleworking and cloud computing, it will become extremely challenging to manage the finite amount of wireless spectrum available for all users to share.

Engineers are employing artificial intelligence to dynamically manage the available wireless spectrum, with an eye toward reducing latency and boosting performance. But most AI methods for classifying and processing wireless signals are power-hungry and can't operate in real-time.

Now, MIT researchers have developed a novel AI hardware accelerator that is specifically designed for wireless signal processing. Their optical processor performs machine-learning computations at the speed of light, classifying wireless signals in a matter of nanoseconds.

The photonic chip is about 100 times faster than the best digital alternative, while converging to about 95 percent accuracy in signal classification. The new hardware accelerator is also scalable and flexible, so it could be used for a variety of high-performance computing applications. At the same time, it is smaller, lighter, cheaper, and more energy-efficient than digital AI hardware accelerators.

The device could be especially useful in future 6G wireless applications, such as cognitive radios that optimize data rates by adapting wireless modulation formats to the changing wireless environment.

By enabling an edge device to perform deep-learning computations in real-time, this new hardware accelerator could provide dramatic speedups in many applications beyond signal processing. For instance, it could help autonomous vehicles make split-second reactions to environmental changes or enable smart pacemakers to continuously monitor the health of a patient's heart.

"There are many applications that would be enabled by edge devices that are capable of analyzing wireless signals. What we've presented in our paper could open up many possibilities for real-time and reliable AI inference. This work is the beginning of something that could be quite impactful," says Dirk Englund, a professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, principal investigator in the Quantum Photonics and Artificial Intelligence Group and the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and senior author of the paper.

He is joined on the paper by lead author Ronald Davis III PhD '24; Zaijun Chen, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the University of Southern California; and Ryan Hamerly, a visiting scientist at RLE and senior scientist at NTT Research. The research appears today in Science Advances.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

14,000 vulnerable feeds found in the U.S.

A major privacy concern involving more than 40,000 security cameras worldwide has been revealed by Cybersecurity firm Bitsight. According to the company's TRACE research division, these cameras are live-streaming video feeds that are fully exposed to the internet — meaning that one can gain access without needing any sort of authentication, encryption, or even a basic password. In most cases, a person can access real-time footage from these exposed cameras simply by knowing their IP address.

Bitsight initially flagged the issue back in 2023, but recent research suggests that the situation “hasn’t gotten any better.” According to the latest research, these vulnerable cameras are not limited to one region or industry. The United States has close to 14,000 cameras that are potentially exposed, with states like California, Texas, Georgia, and New York having the highest numbers. Next on the list is Japan, with 7,000 exposed cameras, followed by Austria, Czechia, and South Korea, each of which have close to 2,000 vulnerable devices.

It is true that not every camera hooked up to the internet is a cause for concern, and some livestreams are set up intentionally to showcase scenes, like a beach or a birdhouse, for public viewing. However, some of these vulnerable cameras have been found in more private environments — including residential setups monitoring front doors, backyards, and even living rooms.

Cameras in office spaces, factories, as well as public transportation systems were also found. Bitsight researchers were able to observe sensitive spaces, monitor foot traffic, and, in some cases, even see details written on whiteboards — all in real time. The majority of the exposed devices are said to be using HTTP, while the rest stream through RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol), which is a common protocol for controlling and managing streaming media over IP networks.

In addition to raising privacy and surveillance concerns, these exposed devices pose serious security risks. Information collected by Bitsight’s Cyber Threat Intelligence team suggests that users are openly discussing the feeds on dark web forums, where users are sharing tools and techniques to gain unauthorized access, and even selling access, to unprotected video streams.

Users and organizations are advised to double-check on how their cameras are configured: Disable remote access if not in use, update to the latest firmware, and make sure the device is protected behind a firewall or connected to a secure network. A simple way to check whether your camera is exposed or not is by accessing it from outside your home network. If you are able to view the camera feed without logging into a secure app or using a VPN (Virtual Private Network), it’s likely open to anyone on the internet. Additionally, one should replace any default usernames and passwords as many camera devices ship with a default set of credentials that are easy to crack.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Nematode Tower power:

Living worm towers are recorded in the wild for the first time, a rare example of collective hitchhiking in nature

• First evidenceof "living towers" in nature: observed in rotting apples and pears from local orchards in Konstanz, Germany
• Tower function confirmed: towers can attach to passing insects and can bridge physical gaps to disperse
• A powerful model:C. elegans are a new a tool for studying the ecology and evolution of collective dispersal

Nematodes are the most abundant animal on earth, but when times get tough, these tiny worms have a hard time moving up and out. So, they play to the strength of their clade. If food runs out and competition turns fierce, they slither towards their numerous kin. They climb onto each other and over one another until their bodies forge a living tower that twists skyward where they might hitch a ride on a passing animal to greener and roomier pastures.

At least that's what scientists assumed. For decades, these worm structures were more mythical than material. Such aggregations, in which animals link bodies for group movement, are rare in nature. Only slime molds, fire ants, and spider mites are known to move in this way. For nematodes, nobody had even seen the aggregations—known as towers— forming anywhere but within the artificial confines of laboratories and growth chambers; and nobody really knew what they were for. Did towers even exist in the real world?

Now, researchers in Konstanz, Germany, have recorded video footage of worms towering in fallen apples and pears from local orchards. The team from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB) and the University of Konstanz combined fieldwork with laboratory experiments to provide the first direct evidence that towering behavior occurs naturally and functions as a means of collective transport.

"I was ecstatic when I saw these natural towers for the first time," says senior author Serena Ding, group leader at the MPI-AB, of the moment when co-author Ryan Greenway sent her a video recording from the field. "For so long natural worm towers existed only in our imaginations. But with the right equipment and lots of curiosity, we found them hiding in plain sight."

Greenway, a technical assistant at the MPI-AB, spent months with a digital microscope combing through decaying fruit in orchards near the university to record natural occurrences and behavior of worm towers. Some of these whole towers were brought into the lab. What was inside the towers surprised the team. Although the fruits were crawling with many species of nematodes, natural towers were made only of a single species, all at the tough larval stage known as a "dauer."

"A nematode tower is not just a pile of worms," says the first author Daniela Perez, a postdoctoral researcher at MPI-AB. "It's a coordinated structure, a superorganism in motion."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

We may already have had our first-ever encounter with dark matter, according to researchers who say a mysteriously high-energy particle detected in 2023 is not a neutrino after all, but something far stranger

An extremely high-energy particle that was spotted tearing through Earth has left scientists flummoxed ever since it was discovered. While many researchers believe the particle was an unusual neutrino, some are now suggesting it may be something even wilder: a particle of dark matter travelling across the cosmos.

The KM3NeT detector, off the coast of Italy, spotted this “impossible” neutrino in 2023 while it was still under construction. The particle in question was of immense proportions, 35 times more energetic than any seen before. Where it came from remains a mystery, with possible sources including a galaxy with a very active central black hole known as a blazar, or a background source of high-energy neutrinos pervading the universe.

[...] IceCube has seen evidence for hundreds of cosmic neutrinos since 2011, but never something as energetic as KM3NeT’s discovery. That was confusing, because whatever source KM3NeT was seeing, IceCube should have seen it too.

Dev says that if the incoming particle was dark matter and not a neutrino, it could explain this mystery. The shallow predicted path of the incoming particle meant that it had to travel through more of Earth to reach KM3NeT than IceCube, increasing the chance of it being scattered into a muon. “The dark matter goes through lots of Earth’s matter,” says Dev, “and we can explain why IceCube didn’t see it.”

The particle would have been produced in a blazar and then fired towards Earth in a beam. Dev favours this idea because high-energy protons in a blazar more efficiently transfer their energy into dark matter than neutrinos, he says. The vast majority of the other events detected by KM3NeT and IceCube would probably still have been neutrinos.

Not everyone is convinced just yet. “From an Occam’s razor perspective, this is probably just an ordinary neutrino that’s exceptional in energy,” says Dan Hooper at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. However, if correct, it would give us a method to find and study dark matter particles, which have never previously been detected. “Everybody would be pretty thrilled if these machines can study not only neutrinos but also dark matter,” says Hooper.

Journal Reference: arXiv DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2505.22754

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

William Dana Atkinson was one of the core people on the teams that created the Lisa and then Macintosh computers at Apple in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was one of the most important and influential computer programmers who has ever lived. It is no exaggeration to say that all computer UIs designed in the last 40 years were shaped and influenced by Atkinson's brilliance and originality.

He dropped out of a doctorate in neuroscience to join Apple in 1978. He became employee # 51. In 2018, he said:

Some say Steve used me, but I say he harnessed and motivated me, and drew out my best creative energy. It was exciting working at Apple, knowing that whatever we invented would be used by millions of people.

Since the weekend when the news first broke, a remarkable range of tributes to the man and his work have appeared. For the Reg FOSS desk, one of the things that has particularly struck us is the range of different aspects of Atkinson's creativity that resonated with different people.

For instance, those working mainly online, such as TechCrunch's Antony Ha, call out HyperCard. Atkinson designed and wrote HyperCard, which introduced the wider world to the concept of hyperlinks as invented by Ted Nelson for his Xanadu hypertext system. Hypercard made it easy to create "stacks" of documents and navigate through them by clicking on links. As The Register has described more than once, it's inspired JavaScript recreations and parts of the Windows 10 UI, but most significantly of all it inspired the creators of the World Wide Web. It is specifically mentioned in the original proposal. Atkinson himself described the inspiration for Hypercard as a 1985 LSD trip.

Anyone who creates or edits pictures on computers uses tools that follow in the footsteps of an earlier Bill Atkinson app: he wrote MacPaint. Between it and his earlier version, LisaSketch, this introduced ideas like tool palettes, which became toolbars; the lasso tool to select objects; zoomed-in pixel editing, which Atkinson called FatBits; and the paint-bucket fill tool, among many other things.

Programmers who know his work nod with respect to lower-level stuff. The story of Apple's visit to Xerox, where the Xerox Alto graphical workstation inspired the Apple Lisa's overlapping windows, is well known. What's less well understood is that Smalltalk could only write or draw into one window, the topmost. It was impossible to update the contents of background windows. Atkinson was on that visit, but he didn't know that. He just assumed the Smalltalk team must have solved that, and all he had to do was work out how. He called his resulting algorithm regions and after a serious 1982 car accident and head injuries, Atkinson's first words to his visiting boss were "Don't worry, Steve, I still remember how to do regions."

Lower-level still, he is remembered for his remarkably efficient dithering algorithm, which you can try here.

As "Apple acolyte" Steven Levy wrote in Rolling Stone, Atkinson also brought Burrell Smith, designer of the original Macintosh hardware, to the project. In his book Insanely Great, Levy described the coming up with regions:

Atkinson worked at the problem for months - not only in long hours at a desk, but literally in his dreams. Upon arising he would record his somnambulant labors in a notebook. Eventually wave after wave of Atkinson's brainpower eroded the problem. He had set our to reinvent the wheel; actually he wound up inventing it.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

US Navy Secretary John Phelan has told the Senate the service needs the right to repair its own gear, and will rethink how it writes contracts to keep control of intellectual property and ensure sailors can fix hardware, especially in a fight.

Speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Phelan cited the case of the USS Gerald R. Ford, America's largest and most expensive nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, which carried a price tag of $13 billion. The ship was struggling to feed its crew of over 4,500 because six of its eight ovens were out of action, and sailors were barred by contract from fixing them themselves.

"I am a huge supporter of right to repair," Phelan told the politicians. "I went on the carrier; they had eight ovens — this is a ship that serves 15,300 meals a day. Only two were working. Six were out."

He pointed out the Navy personnel are capable of fixing their own gear but are blocked by contracts that reserve repairs for vendors, often due to IP restrictions. That drives up costs and slows down basic fixes. According to the Government Accountability Office, about 70 percent [PDF] of a weapon system's life-cycle cost goes to operations and support.

A similar issue plagued the USS Gerald Ford's weapons elevators, which move bombs from deep storage to the flight deck. They reportedly took more than four years after delivery to become fully operational, delaying the carrier's first proper deployment.

"They have to come out and diagnose the problem, and then they'll fix it," Phelan said. "It is crazy. We should be able to fix this."

The Navy is not alone in its concerns, as the US Army is peeved about the right to repair equipment it paid for too. In a rare display of bipartisanship, both Democrats and Republicans agreed that the Army shouldn't be waiting on contractors to fix its kit and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo directing the service to add right-to-repair provisions to its contracts.

"On a go-forward basis, we have been directed to not sign any contracts that don't give us a right to repair," Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll told the House Armed Services Committee on June 4. "On a go-back basis, we have been directed to go and do what we can to go get that right to repair."