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Pilot faces criminal charges after threatening to 'intentionally crash' into Mississippi Walmart

A pilot who threatened to “intentionally crash” into a Walmart in Tupelo, Mississippi, Saturday morning was taken into custody hours later after landing the plane in a field.

The pilot, identified by police as Cory Wayne Patterson, stole the twin-engine Beechcraft King Air 90 from the Tupelo Regional Airport around 5:30 a.m.

Patterson called 911 from the aircraft to say that he was going to crash into Walmart, Tupelo police chief John Quaka said at a news conference Saturday afternoon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgm14D1jHUw

Rest in pizza.

I have three days to learn enough about the Rust programming language to head off the C++ guys at the pass. There's a meeting coming up.

Note that we don't have enough people who know C++ either, other than "everyone else uses it for everything so we should too." That's about the limit of their knowledge. This is PHB-level stuff.

I'm not planning on living out the rest of my career writing and debugging and maintaining C++. No way. Where do I start? I have already said, "I offers memory safety and it's good enough that Linus is letting it in the kernel now."

Help!

When you plant seeds, sometimes one or two don't grow. Another few may sprout but be deformed in some way such that they don't survive. Random mutations and random environmental factors will do that sort of thing.

We humans are products of the natural world. We are surrounded by life competing to survive. Fortunately we have evolved big brains and the intelligence to be able to plan ahead and work together. We can support each other and work to ensure that we are all provided for and to at least attempt to relieve suffering.

A large proportion of us go in to caring professions and study medicine. In the last 150 years or so we've learned about germs, discovered antibiotics and anaesthetics. We don't have to endure operations conscious and aware of pain any more, in general.

Philosophical advances have also been made. I don't claim to be a philosopher and have not read much philosophy, but the simplistic archaic religious beliefs of millennia past have gradually given way to more enlightened thought.

Then Trumpism/the Alt Wrong took hold and Roe vs. Wade was overturned in the USA. There have been a number of journal entries on this site regarding this attack on women's bodily autonomy and the resulting suffering. I saw another story this evening that I though I should share.

The Guardian has a story entitled "Louisiana woman faces 'horrifically cruel' abortion choices over fetus missing skull".

Nature has randomly produced for this woman a foetus without a skull and it will not survive more than a few hours, should it be born. However, the state does not include this condition (acrania) on its list of conditions justifying exceptions from its abortion ban.

Nancy Davis has retained lawyer Ben Crump as she becomes the latest to embody the gut-wrenching decisions some women are being forced to make after the US supreme court’s decision in June to strip away nationwide abortion rights, according to a statement from the attorney’s office.

There are some other horror stories in that article too, like the 16-year-old girl prevented from having an abortion by the state of Florida for being too young to make the decision, but being forced to carry the baby to term. Go figure.

I think the thing that takes the biscuit is the report about the 10-year-old Ohio girl who got pregnant as the result of being raped and had to travel to Indiana for the abortion. From the article

Though some media outlets and rightwing politicians baselessly questioned whether the girl existed or was instead a liberal hoax to stoke support for abortion rights, authorities have since charged a man in connection with the girl’s rape, a crime to which he has purportedly confessed.

Rightwing? Wrongwing, surely?

How to Follow Webb's Next Steps

That was helpful, because it linked me to here:

JWST Weekly Observing Schedules

I was hoping to see more solar system targets. Looks like they took some more Jupiter (and Ganymede) images last week, and the PANSTARRS-C17K2 comet today.

National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day 2022: Insomnia, Potbelly Offering Free Cookies

Insomnia Cookies is celebrating National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day in a big way: From Thursday through Sunday, get a free chocolate chunk, vegan chocolate chunk or gluten-free vegan chocolate chip cookie with any in-store purchase or delivery order from any of the 220-plus Insomnia locations nationwide.

[...] In honor of National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, this Greenpoint, Brooklyn, bistro is offering a special cocktail-and-cookie deal: From 4 p.m. ET until close on Thursday and Friday and 3 p.m. ET to close on Saturday and Sunday, get two free chocolate chip cookies -- made fresh daily with big gooey, chocolatey chunks and flaky sea salt -- with the purchase of a Lexington martini, Leroy's twist on a classic espresso martini made with rye, walnut, coffee and Espelette peppers.

[...] Potbelly Perks members get a free cookie of their choice with the purchase of any sandwich, whole salad or bowl of soup on National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day.

Original Submission

A RISC-V laptop or mini PC with Rockchip RK3588-class performance may be coming soon

Mark Himelstein, Chief Technology Officer, RISC-V International, and Dr. Philipp Tomsich, Chief Technologist & Founder, VRULL GmbH hinted that we may see a RISC-V laptop in 2022 in a presentation entitled “From Technology to Product – Maturing the RISC-V Ecosystem” with one of the slides showing what could be a RISC-V laptop prototype and The Register suspected it might come from the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) since it was planning to build 2,000 RISC-V laptops by the end of 2022.

But there’s at least one more potential RISC-V laptop project coming our way with StarFive asking users to fill out a survey about a laptop, mini PC, or development board/SBC based on a RISC-V SoC with performance comparable to Rockchip RK3588 or MediaTek MT8192 octa-core Cortex-A76/Cortex-A55 processors.

The hardware and software specifications of the device will depend on the answers to the survey. First, it’s not sure we’ll get a RISC-V laptop since respondents will first be asked for the type of product, so we may end up with a fairly powerful RISC-V mini PC or/and SBC first instead.

[...] As a side note, they’ll select 5 winners from the respondents and send them one VisionFive RISC-V SBC with the results announced sometime in July on RVSpace community.

I searched for 5D storage stories and found an update on Project Silica:

Microsoft to Store World’s Music Collection on Quartz Wafers

Everyone knows that if the apocalypse ever arrives, we will need to keep certain items safe for future generations. We’ve already taken care of our collections of plant species with the Global Seed Vault, aka the Doomsday Vault. That currently holds 1,145,693 backup copies of the world’s seed varieties. They will soon be joined by a new vault, which will attempt to backup the world’s music collection. It’ll be called the Global Music Vault, and it will join the seed collection in Svalbard, Norway.

[...] Each quartz wafer (top) will be the size of a drink coaster, at 75 x 75mm and 2mm thick. Each plate will be able to store 100GB of data. Data is added to the wafers via a laser that creates “three-dimensional nanoscale gratings and deformations.” To retrieve the data, a polarized light is used to shine through the glass. From there a machine learning algorithm can decode it. The group says the proof of concept should allow data to be preserved for “many thousands of years.” Project Silica has been in the works for several years now. Back in 2019 Microsoft successfully encoded and decoded the original Superman movie on behalf of Warner Brothers. Glass as a storage medium has also been touted recently by a project involving a 5D disk that could hold data for over 13 billion years.

[...] Though this isn’t a huge data dump, the group envisions it will eventually add tens of petabytes a year.

First off, the concept image shows what looks like racks with enough space for hundreds of thousands of these. How many petabytes of music is in existence, anyway, and at what average bitrate will they store it?

The Project Silica 2019 demo stored Superman on a disc of the same size. 75mm x 75mm x 2mm. That was storing up to a 75.6 GB copy:

Project Silica's glass square that contains Superman measures 7.5 cm x 7.5 cm x 2 mm and holds 75.6 GB of data. That may not sound so impressive given that a dual-layer Blu-ray holds 50 GB on 12 cm disc. But as Microsoft develops the technology, the company is creating discs with higher and higher capacities. Plus, the main benefit of this new medium is longevity and stability, not capacity. Research teams have put the square discs through their paces, ensuring the data is still readable even after baking them in ovens, dunking them in boiling water, heating them in microwaves and scratching them with steel wool.

[...] The technology still needs to mature and engineers need to create a unified read/write device similar to today's optical disc burners.

So now they are fitting 100 GB on the square and making lots of them. Maybe they could fit 100 GB on one 3 years ago but the movie was smaller than the disc capacity. Not impressive. The nice part is that it appears to have near-infinite longevity as long as it isn't shattered into pieces, so it directly beats similar Blu-ray/Archival Discs for long term storage, and can be a superior option to HDDs, SSDs, and tape if the storage density is acceptable. There's no word on whether read/write is remotely comparable to CD/DVD/Blu-ray and if it would ever be accessible to home users.

What we want is something with the same properties but around 1,000x the density, like this:

5D Optical Storage Could Mean 500 TB of Data on Small Glass Disc

In addition, if the technology does become viable for commercial use, organizations will have to be careful about how it’s used and who uses it.

“This kind of media would be ideal for anyone wanting to steal data in large quantities and have access to the hardware,” Enderle said. “Think [Edward] Snowden on steroids. The write speed limits this, but an employee could pull the data slowly over time and then remove the medium. But as write speeds increase, the viability of this storage medium for data theft will increase substantially.”

Thanks, Enterprise Storage Forum. Future Snowdens in the NSA would probably be destroyed by internal security alerts, but other organizations have lax security so sneakernet that shit out.

I would like to see one of these holographic crystal storage concepts make it into the hands of millions of people. Many people could use something with greater storage density than HDDs and SSDs, and better endurance/reliability than Blu-ray discs and tape (indefinite lifespan instead of 10-50 years). The read/write speeds are one of the main problems. Maybe it would end up as another spinning 12 cm disc format for practical purposes. Rewritability is unlikely, but the capacity would be so large that it might not matter.

The James Webb Space Telescope is finally ready to do science – and it’s seeing the universe more clearly than even its own engineers hoped for

As of June 15, 2022, all of Webb’s instruments are on and have taken their first images. Additionally, four imaging modes, three time series modes and three spectroscopic modes have been tested and certified, leaving just three to go.

On July 12, NASA plans to release a suite of teaser observations that illustrate Webb’s capabilities. These will show the beauty of Webb imagery and also give astronomers a real taste of the quality of data they will receive.

After July 12, the James Webb Space Telescope will start working full time on its science mission. The detailed schedule for the coming year hasn’t yet been released, but astronomers across the world are eagerly waiting to get the first data back from the most powerful space telescope ever built.

I expect they'll throw the Pillars of Creation or something like that in the first batch, but I'd like to see a dwarf planet like Sedna. Neptune might also be a good choice, assuming the JWST can beat the VLT.

AMD made a number of announcements about its future CPUs and GPUs at its 2022 Financial Analyst Day:

CPUs

• Zen 4 (Raphael) is coming this year to consumer desktop CPUs before Epyc. Zen 4 with 3D V-Cache and Zen 4c (smaller, performance-per-area-optimized cores) are coming in 2023 on TSMC N5 or N4 nodes.
• Products with Zen 5, Zen 5 with 3D V-Cache, and Zen 5c cores will launch in 2024 or later on TSMC N4 and N3 nodes.
• Zen 4 with 3D V-Cache (Raphael-X) for desktops will launch in 2023, as well as a Zen 4-based Threadripper (may or may not be "Pro", could have up to 96 cores).
• Zen 5 for desktop in 2024 is referred to as "Granite Ridge".
• Zen 4 Epyc with 3D V-Cache will include up to over 1 GB of L3 cache, presumably 1,152 MiB on a 96-core model using twelve 8-core chiplets (up from 768 MiB on Milan-X).
• There will be a version of Zen 4 Epyc for telecoms called "Siena".

APUs/GPUs

• "Phoenix Point" APUs for 2023 laptops will use Zen 4 and RDNA3 on TSMC N4.
• "Strix Point" APUs for 2024 laptops will use Zen 5 and RDNA3+ on an "advanced node" (maybe TSMC N3).
• Both Phoenix and Strix Point will include an Artificial Intelligence Engine (AIE), presumably for machine learning acceleration and possibly based on Xilinx IP.
• AMD claims that RDNA 3 will have +50% performance per Watt.
• RDNA 3 GPUs (and presumably any product with it like Phoenix APUs) will have AV1 hardware encode support.

AMD Zen 4 Update: 8% to 10% IPC Uplift, 25% More Perf-Per-Watt, V-Cache Chips Coming
AMD RDNA 3/Navi 3X GPU Update: 50% Better Perf-Per-Watt, Using Chiplets For First Time
AMD: Combining CDNA 3 and Zen 4 for MI300 Data Center APU in 2023
AMD Updated EPYC Roadmap: 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" Announced, Coming by End of 2024
AMD Unveils Siena, A Lower Cost EPYC Family With Up to 64 Zen 4 Cores
AMD Announces Genoa-X: 4th Gen EPYC with Up to 96 Zen 4 Cores and 1GB L3 V-Cache
Updated AMD Notebook Roadmap: Zen 4 on 4nm in 2023, Zen 5 By End of 2024
AMD's Desktop CPU Roadmap: 2024 Brings Zen 5-based "Granite Ridge"
AMD’s 2022-2024 Client GPU Roadmap: RDNA 3 This Year, RDNA 4 Lands in 2024
AMD Zen Architecture Roadmap: Zen 5 in 2024 With All-New Microarchitecture