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Starship SN5 Hop Today or Tomorrow
SpaceX Starship rocket’s flight debut set for Monday
For the first time ever, a full-scale SpaceX Starship prototype could be less than a day away from an inaugural flight test in Boca Chica, Texas.
Expected to target the same 150m (~500 ft) maximum altitude as Starhopper’s final flight, the hop will see the full-scale tank section of Starship SN5 attempt to follow in the footsteps of its odd predecessor. Starhopper was essentially a back-of-the-envelope proof of concept, demonstrating that a large rocket could technically be built out of common steel with facilities so spartan and basic that it defied belief.
[...] SpaceX initially wanted to turn Starship SN5 around for its hop debut on Sunday, August 2nd – barely two days [after the static fire test]. Yesterday’s window came and went, though, and SpaceX ultimately pushed its hop test plans back by 24 hours and added a new backup window on August 4th.
Launch window is from 8am to 8pm CDT (13:00-01:00 UTC).
Quibi Floods Short Form Emmy Nominations
Quibi’s recipe for winning an Emmy without really trying
Television’s most important award might be going to its least important streaming service: Quibi. The service was nominated for 10 Emmy Awards, of which it’s almost certain to win at least one.
Quibi — which one estimate claims retained only 8 percent of people who signed up for its three-month free trial — hasn’t suddenly started putting out content on the same level as Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. Instead, the short-form streaming service is competing in a game that no one else is playing.
At face value, Quibi’s nominations and near-certain win seem impossible: Quibi only has 16 original drama or comedy shows, has been around for just over three months, and has made about the same impact on the media landscape as a water balloon has on an Abrams tank.
[...] Quibi’s nominations are exclusively in the short-form-specific Emmy categories. Its competition is a few web-series spinoffs of larger shows and a YouTube series. Unless things go very badly for the mobile-focused streaming service, it’ll be walking away with at least one award come September.
[...] A report from Sensor Tower earlier in July claimed that the company was only able to convert about 72,000 of its initial 910,000 users into paid customers when the three-month free trial offer expired.
Assuming random selection of winners, Quibi has just a 2.4% chance of winning zero Emmy Awards.
Previously: Fox Could Buy Tubi While NBCUniversal Eyes Vudu
Meg Whitman-Run Streaming Service "Quibi" Launches, Reception Mixed
The Fall of Quibi: How Did a Starry $1.75bn Netflix Rival Crash So Fast?
China Takes Control of U.S. Consulate in Chengdu
Flag lowered at US consulate in Chengdu as China takes control
Chinese authorities have taken over the US consulate general in Chengdu, marking the diplomatic mission’s official closure and a new low point in ties between the world’s largest economies.
At dawn on Monday, the American flag outside the consulate was lowered while police held back crowds that had gathered over the weekend to watch. At 10am, the mission was closed, according to China’s foreign ministry.
Chinese soldiers goose-stepped in front of the consulate while teams of workers in hazmat suits and officials dressed in white short-sleeved dress shirts and black briefcases entered the mission. Workers draped grey clothes over signs bearing the consulate’s name.
“Competent Chinese authorities entered through the front entrance and took it over,” the foreign ministry said.
U.S.-China engagement is over. Is military conflict next?
There is now a bipartisan consensus in the United States on the need for a tougher China policy. Even longtime China scholars and policymakers who have spent their lives building closer ties with China in the belief that such engagement would induce democratic reform have grown disillusioned.
At the same time, they say the Trump administration’s “sledgehammer” approach, which seems intent on starting another cold war and leaves no room for dialogue, is counterproductive and disingenuous in its purported concern for Chinese people. It is also dangerous and could lead to outright conflict, they say.
“There are ways to handle the relationship without blasting through it,” said Deborah Seligsohn, who served as a U.S. diplomat for more than two decades, mostly in Asia. “There are ways to weigh the pluses and minuses. It doesn’t have to be this antagonistic.”
How the Cold War Between China and U.S. Is Intensifying (archive)
The Trump administration has increasingly challenged China’s assertions of sovereignty and control over much of the South China Sea, including vital maritime shipping lanes. Just last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has described China as a major security threat, decreed that most of China’s claims in the South China Sea are “completely unlawful,” setting up potential military confrontations between Chinese and U.S. naval forces in the Pacific.
[...] The New York Times, concerned about the possibility of further limitations on journalists working in China, announced last week that it was relocating much of its major news hub in Hong Kong to Seoul, South Korea.
Previously: U.S. Scoops Up Chinese Spies; "Friendship" Ended
U.S. Scoops Up Chinese Spies; "Friendship" Ended
US arrests three Chinese nationals for visa fraud
The US has charged four Chinese nationals with visa fraud for allegedly lying about their membership of China's armed forces.
Three are under arrest while the FBI is seeking to arrest the fourth, who is said to be in China's San Francisco consulate.
FBI agents have also interviewed people in 25 US cities who have an "undeclared affiliation" with China's military.
Prosecutors say it is part of a Chinese plan to send army scientists to the US.
Singapore man admits being Chinese spy in US
A Singaporean man has pleaded guilty in the US to working as an agent of China, the latest incident in a growing stand-off between Washington and Beijing.
Jun Wei Yeo was charged with using his political consultancy in America as a front to collect information for Chinese intelligence, US officials say.
Separately, the US said a Chinese researcher accused of hiding her ties to China's military was detained.
China earlier ordered the closure of the US consulate in Chengdu.
The move to shut down the diplomatic mission in the south-western city was in response to the US closing China's consulate in Houston.
FBI arrests Chinese researcher for visa fraud after she hid at consulate in San Francisco
A researcher who took refuge in the Chinese consulate in San Francisco after allegedly lying to investigators about her Chinese military service was arrested and will appear in court on Monday, according to a senior Justice Department official.
According to court documents unsealed earlier this week in the Eastern District of California, Juan Tang, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, applied for a nonimmigrant J1 visa in October 2019. The visa was issued in November 2019 and Tang entered the United States a month later.
Tang allegedly made fraudulent statements on her visa application by concealing that she served in the Chinese military. The FBI concluded that Tang was a uniformed officer of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force after photographs of her were uncovered on electronic media seized in accordance with a search warrant.
Officials Push U.S.-China Relations Toward Point of No Return
Top aides to President Trump want to leave a lasting legacy of ruptured ties between the two powers. China’s aggression has been helping their cause.
[...] China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has inflamed the fight, brushing aside international concern about the country’s rising authoritarianism to consolidate his own political power and to crack down on basic freedoms, from Xinjiang to Hong Kong. By doing so, he has hardened attitudes in Washington, fueling a clash that at least some in China believe could be dangerous to the country’s interests.
The combined effect could prove to be Mr. Trump’s most consequential foreign policy legacy, even if it’s not one he has consistently pursued: the entrenchment of a fundamental strategic and ideological confrontation between the world’s two largest economies.
Ukraine Prez: Everyone should watch the 2005 film Earthlings
Ukraine Hostage Standoff Ends After President Agrees To Promote Joaquin Phoenix Film
A hostage standoff on a bus in western Ukraine ended Tuesday after a bizarre demand from the captor was met when the country's president publicly recommended a 15-year-old animal rights documentary narrated by Joaquin Phoenix.
Just before the end of the 12-hour standoff in Lutsk, a city located some 250 miles west of Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy posted a video clip to his Facebook page stating: "Everyone should watch the 2005 film Earthlings."
The post has since been deleted.
Anyone in Phoenix want some old computers?
I'm moving soon, to a much smaller place, and I can't take all my old machines with me. I suppose I could recycle them, but it seems like a damn shame, since most of them work just fine, they're just old.
Anyone want four Pentium 3 to Pentium 4 era desktops? The drives have been nuked, so they've got no OS, but they used to run Linux.
I figure if anyone out there can also appreciate older hardware, they'd probably be here.
5-port 2.5GbE Switch
At Last, a 2.5Gbps Consumer Network Switch: QNAP Releases QSW-1105-5T 5-Port Switch
After entirely too long of a delay, the wait for faster consumer-grade network switches appears to be coming to an end. This week QNAP launched its QSW-1105-5T switch, one of the industry’s first unmanaged 2.5Gbps (2.5GBASE-T) switches. The 5-port switch supports 2.5GbE operation on all five of its RJ45 Ethernet ports, and along with being unmanaged it is also fanless, allowing the switch to work maintenance-free and installed virtually anywhere. The QSW-1105-5T is already on sale in Taiwan for roughly $100, meaning that we’re looking at a price-per-port of about $20.
[...] As the first of what will undoubtedly be many 2.5G switches over the coming months, the QSW-1105-5T also gives us our first real look at what we can expect from this generation of switches as far as footprints and power consumption goes. Since it’s not carved from a pro-grade switch, the 18 cm x 14.5 cm switch is significantly smaller than earlier NBASE-T switches. And with a maximum power consumption rating of 12 W, we’re looking at power consumption of just a bit over 2 Watts per port, which is also a significant improvement over admittedly far more powerful switches.
All of which sounds unremarkable, and indeed that’s exactly what makes the QSW-1105-5T so interesting. The biggest barrier to wide consumer adoption over the last few years has been the cost – both in regards to the core technology and added frills – so we’ve been waiting for quite a while to see NBASE-T technology transition from pro-grade switches to cheap, consumer-grade gear.
PinePhone Gets New Version With 3GiB RAM and 32GB Storage
Pinephone “Community Edition: PostmarketOS” Launched with 3GB RAM, 32GB Flash, USB-C Hub
After PinePhone “BraveHeart Edition” with any OS pre-installed introduced at the end of last year, Pine64 launched PinePhone “Community Edition: UBports” with Ubuntu Touch last April, and now the company is taking pre-orders for Pinephone “Community Edition: PostmarketOS with Convergence Package”.
Besides using a different operating system, the new PinePhone also got a hardware upgrade with 3GB RAM and 32GB flash instead of the 2GB/16GB configuration from earlier models. Due to the changes and the addition of a USB-C dock for convergence, the price has also gone up from $149.99 to $199.99 with shipping scheduled to start at the end of August. If you don’t need the extra memory, storage, and convergence package, you can still pre-order PinePhone with postmarketOS for $149.99.
Two Chinese Companies Working on Discrete GPUs?
Previously:
Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) Starts "14nm" FinFET Volume Production
Look out Nvidia and AMD… Chinese GPU maker has a GTX 1080-level card in development
The new story:
Asia based Zhaoxin has plans for a dedicated graphics card series
A 70 Watt GPU wouldn't be as interesting as the 200 Watt "1080-level" GPU w/HBM concept from Jingjia Micro, but it could be good enough for cheap office PCs. It's also just a start: note that Zhaoxin's CPUs are on "16nm" while the GPU is on "28nm".
Left/Right, what do you *really* think of the other side?
One interesting thing about Soylent News is that there's a very clear, very tangible political division in comments for practically everything. You see everything from Nazi sympathizers to full-blown Communists, but the far ends of the spectrum generally talk much more often. I suppose that could describe wider America, too, but usually it's not so intermixed in real life. I suppose internet makes that easier.
Myself, I'm socially center-left, and far-left economically. I value freedom of speech as a near-absolute, but I think capitalism is about to burn itself out and take a lot of us with it. But whatever, my beliefs are not what this one is about.
I'm wondering, what do Soylentils *really* think of their political opposition?
What do far-right think of the far-left, etc?
Describe how you think they view the world, what you think motivates them, nothing's off the table.
Only rule is, be honest about how you actually perceive them.
I might weigh in at some point in the comments, but I can't promise that.
I wonder if this journal will get any attention, whether it will explode into a white-hot thermite flame war, or whether I'll just get two or three comments calling me a faggot.
I'm genuinely curious about this. Let's hear it.
