SFGate reports: A herculean effort is required to produce an event centered around the intellectual property of "Star Wars" (protected within the Disney galactic empire), but a film commissioner in Northern California was determined and got creative to solicit a response from the film franchise owners. "I offered to send my adult daughter, who's a chef, to Lucasfilm to make them meals if they let us do this," said Cassandra Hesseltine, commissioner for the Humboldt-Del Norte Film Commission. The plea caught the attention of the San Francisco-based company, and a "Star Wars" festival in the redwoods was born.

After a decade of planning, following an extensive back-and-forth to comply with IP rights, the film commission has announced the Forest Moon Festival. The two-day event commemorates the 40th anniversary of "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi" June 2 and 3 in Northern California. It includes four film screenings [outdoors and indoors] between the two counties and holiday-like fanfare, with costumes and parties in downtown Eureka and on Cal Poly Humboldt's campus in Arcata.

The festival's vision is to gather community members and outsider fans of the series for a summer jubilee akin to the Fourth of July, where folks are encouraged to dress up to the theme and congregate under the redwood trees.
The article also notes that in June the monthly street fair in the town of Eureka "is expected to feature a 20-person squadron of Stormtroopers marching down main street."

San Francisco autonomous vehicle company Cruise recalled and updated the software of its fleet of 300 cars, reports the San Francisco Chronicle, " after a Cruise taxi rear-ended a local bus "when the car's software got confused by the articulated vehicle, according to a federal safety report and the company."

The voluntary report notes that Cruise updated its software on March 25th. Since last month's low-speed crash, which resulted in no injuries, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said the company chose to conduct a voluntary recall, and the software update assured such a rare incident "would not recur...." As for the March bus collision, Vogt said the software fix was uploaded to Cruise's entire fleet of 300 cars within two days. He said the company's probe found the crash scenario "exceptionally rare" with no other similar collisions.

"Although we determined that the issue was rare, we felt the performance of this version of software in this situation was not good enough," Vogt wrote in a blog post. "We took the proactive step of notifying NHTSA that we would be filing a voluntary recall of previous versions of our software that were impacted by the issue." The CEO said such voluntary recalls will probably become "commonplace."

"We believe this is one of the great benefits of autonomous vehicles compared to human drivers; our entire fleet of AVs is able to rapidly improve, and we are able to carefully monitor that progress over time," he said.
The Cruise car was traveling about 10 miles per hour, and the collision caused only minor damage to its front fender, Vogt's blog post explained. San Francisco's buses have front and back coaches connected by articulated rubber, and when the Cruise taxi lost sight of the front half, it made the assumption that it was still moving (rather than recognizing that the back coach had stopped). Or, as Cruise told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, their vehicle ""inaccurately predicted the movement" of the bus. It was not the first San Francisco incident involving Cruise since June, when it became the first company in a major city to win the right to taxi passengers in driverless vehicles — in this case Chevrolet Bolts. The city's Municipal Transportation Agency and County Transportation Authority recorded at least 92 incidents from May to December 2022 in which autonomous ride-hailing vehicles caused problems on city streets, disrupting traffic, Muni transit and emergency responders, according to letters sent to the California Public Utilities Commission....

Just two days before the Cruise crash in March, the company had more problems with Muni during one of San Francisco's intense spring storms. A falling tree brought down a Muni line near Clay and Jones streets on March 21, and a witness reported on social media that two Cruise cars drove through caution tape into the downed wire. A company representative said neither car had passengers and teams were immediately dispatched to remove the vehicles.

On Jan. 22, a driverless Cruise car entered an active firefighting scene and nearly ran over hoses. Fire crews broke a car window to try to stop it.

InfoWorld reports: Zig, a general purpose programming language that interacts with C/C++ programs and promises to be a modern alternative to C, has made an appearance in the Tiobe index of programming language popularity. Zig entered the top 50 in the April edition of the Tiobe Programming Community Index, ranking 46th, albeit with a rating of just 0.19%. By contrast, the Google-promoted Carbon language, positioned as an experimental successor to C++, ranked just 168th.
Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen argues that high-performance languages "are booming due to the vast amounts of data that needs to be processed nowadays. As a result, C and C++ are doing well in the top 10 and Rust seems to be a keeper in the top 20." Zig has all the nice features of C and C++ (such as explicit memory management enhanced with option types) and has abandoned the not-so-nice features (such as the dreadful preprocessing). Entering the top 50 is no guarantee to become a success, but it is at least a first noteworthy step. Good luck Zig!
Tiobe bases its monthly ranking of programming language popularity on search engine results for courses, third party vendors, and engineers. Here's what they's calculated for the most popular programming languages in April of 2023:

• Python
• C
• Java
• C++
• C#
• Visual Basic
• JavaScript
• SQL
• PHP
• Go

April's top 10 was nearly identical to the rankings a year ago, but assembly language fell from 2022's #8 position to #12 in 2023. SQL and PHP rose one rank (into 2023's #8 and #9 positions) — and as in March, the rankings now shows Go as the 10th most popular programming language.

eFile.com, an IRS-authorized e-file software service provider used by many for filing their tax returns, has been caught serving JavaScript malware. BleepingComputer reports: eFile.com was caught serving malware, as spotted by multiple users and researchers. The malicious JavaScript file in question is called 'popper.js'. The development comes at a crucial time when U.S. taxpayers are wrapping up their IRS tax returns before the April 18th due date. BleepingComputer can confirm, the malicious JavaScript file 'popper.js' was being loaded by almost every page of eFile.com, at least up until April 1st. As of today, the file is no longer seen serving the malicious code.

On March 17th, a Reddit thread surfaced where multiple eFile.com users suspected the website was "hijacked." At the time, the website showed an SSL error message that, some suspected, was fake and indicative of a hack. Turns out that's indeed the case. [...] The malicious JavaScript file 'update.js', further attempts to prompt users to download next stage payload, depending on whether they are using Chrome [update.exe - VirusTotal] or Firefox [installer.exe - VirusTotal]. Antivirus products have already started flagging these executables as trojans.

BleepingComputer has independently confirmed these binaries establish a connection to a Tokyo-based IP address, 47.245.6.91, that appears to be hosted with Alibaba. The same IP also hosts the illicit domain, infoamanewonliag[.]online associated with this incident. Security research group, MalwareHunterTeam further analyzed these binaries, and stated that these contain Windows botnets written in PHP -- a fact that the research group mocked. Additionally, the group called out eFile.com for leaving the malicious code on its website for weeks: "So, the website of [efile.com]... got compromised at least around middle of March & still not cleaned," writes MalwareHunterTeam.

Remember that entrepreneur planning an ostentatious NFT-based restaurant/members-only club in San Francisco? Seven months later it's still "an empty husk of a building, hindered by construction delays and unfulfilled crypto dreams," reports SFGate: Last August, Joshua Sigel held a "groundbreaking" event at what he said would be the future home of Sho Restaurant, located atop Salesforce Park in San Francisco. He told the gathered media that construction of the proposed Japanese fine dining restaurant would begin in less than two months, once some permitting issues were resolved, with a targeted opening date of September or October of 2023.

Sigel maintained that he'd soon be offering 3,275 Sho Club NFT (non-fungible token) memberships — first via a private sale, then a larger public sale in late September — which would serve as the backbone of Sho Restaurant's clientele. (Sigel is the CEO of Sho Group, which encapsulates Sho Restaurant and Sho Club.) There were to be 2,878 "Earth" NFT memberships, priced at $7,500 each; 377 "Water" NFT memberships, priced at $15,000 each; and 20 "Fire" NFT memberships; priced at $300,000 each. The NFTs are basically membership cards for the restaurant, spruced up with Web3 jargon.... Each membership tier comes with increasingly luxurious benefits, though restaurant reservations would also be available for nonmembers.

Seven months later, things don't seem to be going very well for Sho Club or for Sho Restaurant. I recently walked over to Salesforce Park and peered inside the shell of the building that's supposed to become a restaurant; I saw an empty space that looks almost exactly the same as it did in August. The mock-up design photos that journalists looked at during the "groundbreaking" in August remain strewn about on the floor. Permits for Sho Restaurant haven't been issued, the result of Sho Restaurant designers not yet responding to a number of San Francisco Department of Building Inspection notes, among a host of permitting steps that haven't been completed. Sho Club social media accounts have been radio silent since late September....

Sho Club appears to have sold around 100 NFT memberships, rather than 3,275, as Sigel originally projected. I repeatedly reached out to Sigel, to Sho Club, and its public relations representatives. No one replied to my questions.

"Connecticut police have charged two people with cutting more than 2,000 fiber optic cables" on March 24, reports the Associated Press — leaving more than 15,000 people without internet access. Norwalk police said they arrested Asheville, North Carolina, residents Jillian Persons and Austin Geddings on Saturday during a surveillance operation. Both were charged with larceny and criminal mischief crimes, as well as interfering with police. Persons also was accused of giving a false statement to police. Both were detained on $200,000 bail....The outages caused by the cable cutting have since been restored, according to Optimum's website.
The Stamford Advocate investigated how many people were affected: Norwalk Deputy Police Chief Terry Blake said Sunday more than 40,000 customers in the area were left without internet service as a result of the vandalism. However, an Optimum spokesperson claimed at the time the outages only affected roughly 16,000 customers and the inflated numbers were inaccurate because of an issue with the company's online outage map.

Today a warning was published from the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle. "Experts say post-pandemic woes stemming from office workers staying home instead of commuting into the city could send San Francisco into a 'doom loop' that would gut its tax base, decimate fare-reliant regional transit systems like BART and trap it in an economic death spiral...." Despite our housing crisis, it was years into the COVID pandemic before our leaders meaningfully questioned the logic of reserving some of the most prized real estate on Earth for fickle suburbanites and their cars. Downtown, after all, was San Francisco's golden goose. Companies in downtown offices accounted for 70% of San Francisco's pre-pandemic jobs and generated nearly 80% of its economic output, according to city economist Ted Egan. And so we wasted generous federal COVID emergency funds trying to bludgeon, cajole and pray for office workers to return downtown instead of planning for change. We're now staring down the consequences for that lack of vision.

The San Francisco metropolitan area's economic recovery from the pandemic ranked 24th out of the 25 largest regions in the U.S., besting only Baltimore, according to a report from the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. In the first quarter of 2023, San Francisco's office vacancy rate shot up to a record-high 29.4% — the biggest three-year increase of any U.S. city. The trend isn't likely to end anytime soon: In January, nearly 30% of San Francisco job openings were for hybrid or fully remote work, the highest share of the nation's 50 largest cities. Amid lower property, business and real estate transfer taxes, the city is projecting a $728 million deficit over the next two fiscal years. Transit ridership remains far below pre-pandemic levels. In January, downtown San Francisco BART stations had just 30% of the rider exits they did in 2019, according to a report from Egan's office. Many Bay Area transit agencies, including Muni, are rapidly approaching a fiscal cliff.

San Francisco isn't dead; as of March, it was home to an estimated 173 of the country's 655 companies valued at more than $1 billion. Tourism is beginning to rebound. And new census data shows that San Francisco's population loss is slowing, a sign its pandemic exodus may be coming to an end. But the city can't afford to wait idly for things to reach equilibrium again. It needs to evolve — quickly. Especially downtown. That means rebuilding the neighborhood's fabric, which won't be cheap or easy. Office-to-housing conversions are notoriously tricky and expensive. Demolishing non-historic commercial buildings that no longer serve a purpose in the post-pandemic world is all but banned. And, unlike New York after 9/11, San Francisco is a city that can't seem to stop getting in its own way.
So what's the solution? The CEO of the Bay Area Council suggests public-private partnerships that "could help shift downtown San Francisco's focus from tech — with employees now accustomed to working from home — to research and development, biotech, medical research and manufacturing, which all require in-person workers."

And last week San Francisco's mayor proposed more than 100 changes to streamline the permitting process for small businesses, and on Monday helped introduce legislation making it easier to convert office buildings to housing, expand pop-up business opportunities, and fill some empty storefronts. This follows a February executive order to speed housing construction. The editorial points out that "About 40% of office buildings in downtown San Francisco evaluated in a study would be good candidates for housing due to their physical characteristics and location and could be converted into approximately 11,200 units, according to research from SPUR and the Urban Land Institute San Francisco."

But without some action, the editorial's headline argues that "Downtown San Francisco is at risk of collapsing — and taking much of the Bay Area with it."

Clancy William James writes via The Conversation: We have just published evidence in Nature Astronomy for what might be producing mysterious bursts of radio waves coming from distant galaxies, known as fast radio bursts or FRBs. Two colliding neutron stars -- each the super-dense core of an exploded star -- produced a burst of gravitational waves when they merged into a "supramassive" neutron star. We found that two and a half hours later they produced an FRB when the neutron star collapsed into a black hole. Or so we think. The key piece of evidence that would confirm or refute our theory -- an optical or gamma-ray flash coming from the direction of the fast radio burst -- vanished almost four years ago. In a few months, we might get another chance to find out if we are correct. [...]

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has found two binary neutron star mergers. Crucially, the second, known as GW190425, occurred when a new FRB-hunting telescope called CHIME was also operational. However, being new, it took CHIME two years to release its first batch of data. When it did so, [Alexandra Moroianu, a masters student at the University of Western Australia and lead author of the study] quickly identified a fast radio burst called FRB 20190425A which occurred only two and a half hours after GW190425. Exciting as this was, there was a problem -- only one of LIGO's two detectors was working at the time, making it very uncertain where exactly GW190425 had come from. In fact, there was a 5% chance this could just be a coincidence. Worse, the Fermi satellite, which could have detected gamma rays from the merger -- the "smoking gun" confirming the origin of GW190425 -- was blocked by Earth at the time. [...]

LIGO and two other gravitational wave detectors, Virgo and KAGRA, will turn back on in May this year, and be more sensitive than ever, while CHIME and other radio telescopes are ready to immediately detect any FRBs from neutron star mergers. In a few months, we may find out if we've made a key breakthrough -- or if it was just a flash in the pan.

Huawei has reportedly completed work on electronic design automation (EDA) tools for laying out and making chips down to 14nm process nodes. The Register reports: Chinese media said the platform is one of 78 being developed by the telecoms equipment giant to replace American and European chip design toolkits that have become subject to export controls by the US and others. Huawei's EDA platform was reportedly revealed by rotating Chairman Xu Zhijun during a meeting in February, and later confirmed by media in China. [...] Huawei's focus on EDA software for 14nm and larger chips reflects the current state of China's semiconductor industry. State-backed foundry operator SMIC currently possesses the ability to produce 14nm chips at scale, although there have been some reports the company has had success developing a 7nm process node.

Today, the EDA market is largely controlled by three companies: California-based Synopsys and Cadence, as well as Germany's Siemens. According to the industry watchers at TrendForce, these three companies account for roughly 75 percent of the EDA market. And this poses a problem for Chinese chipmakers and foundries, which have steadily found themselves cut off from these tools. Synopsys and Cadence's EDA tech is already subject to several of these export controls, which were stiffened by the US Commerce Department last summer to include state-of-the-art gate-all-around (GAA) transistors. This January, the White House also reportedly stopped issuing export licenses to companies supplying the likes of Huawei.

This is particularly troublesome for Huawei, foundry operator SMIC, and memory vendor YMTC to name a few on the US Entity List, a roster of companies Uncle Sam would prefer you not to do business with. It leaves them unable to access recent and latest technologies, at the very least. So the development of a homegrown EDA platform for 14nm chips serves as insurance in case broader access to Western production platforms is cut off entirely.

After debating the term in a recent Slashdot subthread, longtime reader Tablizer wants to pose the question to a larger audience: what exactly are 'microservices'? Over the past few years I've asked many colleagues what "microservices" are, and get a gazillion different answers. "Independent deploy-ability" has been an issue as old as the IBM hills. Don't make anything "too big" nor "too small"; be it functions, files, apps, name-spaces, tables, databases, etc.

Overly large X's didn't need special terms, such as "monofunction". We'd just call it "poorly partitioned/sized/factored". (Picking the right size requires skill and experience, both in technology and the domain.) Dynamic languages are usually "independently deployable" at the file level, so what is a PHP "monolith", for example?

Puzzles like this are abound when trying to use the Socratic method to tease out specific-ness. Socrates would quit and become a goat herder, as such discussions often turn sour and personal. Here's a recent Slashdot subthread debating the term.

"Google's Go language has re-entered the top 10 of the Tiobe index of programming language popularity, after a nearly six-year absence," reports InfoWorld: Go ranks 10th in the March edition of the index, after placing 11th the previous month. The language last appeared in the top 10 in July 2017.

The re-emergence of Go in the March 2023 index is being attributed to its popularity with software engineers and its strength in combining the right features, namely built-in concurrency, garbage collection, static typing, and good performance. Google's backing also helps, improving long-term trust in the language, Tiobe said.
The languages Go beat out include "assembly language" at #11, followed by MATLAB, Delphi/Object Pascal, Scratch, and Classic Visual Basic.

Here's the complete top-ten most popular programming languages, according to TIOBE:

• Python
• C
• Java
• C++
• C#
• Visual Basic
• JavaScript
• SQL
• PHP
• Go

$4,800 buys you a two-day "immersive" experience on the Star Wars-themed "Galactic Starcruiser" at Disney World — a pseudo cruise ship in space.

But one year after it opened, Disney is "cutting back" some of its bookings, reports SFGate: Earlier this year, it began offering its first sizable discounts to the general public. Now, the Starcruiser booking calendar shows only two voyages per week will be available for most of October, November and December. Only Thanksgiving week and Christmas week are offering three voyages....

"Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser is one of the most ambitious, innovative projects we've ever brought to life and is unlike anything we've done before — it continues to be among our highest-rated guest experiences due to its immersive environment and incredible service provided by our stellar crew," a Disney spokesperson told SFGATE. "We learned a lot from our guests during the first year of operation and have made some adjustments along the way to continue delivering an unforgettable experience for everyone who visits."

"For years, California has championed high-speed rail as its future, even as its marquee project faces headwinds," writes SFGate.

"While the high-speed rail connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco slowly comes to fruition, a separate rail plan in Southern California has finalized an important labor deal, and construction is set to begin this year... to connect Las Vegas to Los Angeles with a new 218-mile rail system. On Feb. 23, Brightline announced it had reached an agreement to work with a coalition of major labor unions. The High-Speed Rail Labor Coalition includes 13 rail unions representing more than 160,000 freight, regional, commuter and passenger railroad workers.... The $10 billion investment is set to create 35,000 jobs during construction, with more than $10 billion in economic impact....

Brightline West trains can reach speeds of up to 200 mph. The company said its trains will cut down the more than 40 million one-way trips to Las Vegas each year by car or bus. It said it aims to attract 12 million of those trips annually and reduce CO2 emissions by removing 3 million vehicles and 400,000 tons of CO2 from the road. Moreover, the train is expected to relieve traffic on Interstate 15....

Brightline Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs Ben Porritt told SFGATE that Brightline West plans to break ground later in 2023. "Our construction timeline is approximately 3.5-4 years, which would have us opening by the end of 2027," he said.
"Riders can expect a travel time of just over two hours as the train reaches its 180 mph top speed," reports Jalopnik. "The line is expected to be an elevated line as well running above the desert floor."

Brightline trains in Florida are already reaching speeds of 130 miles per hour.

The editorial board of the Los Angeles Times writes that it doesn't take a Chinese spy balloon to threaten ocean wildlife. "Even the child-size pink plastic 'Happy Birthday' balloon can be hazardous if left in the wrong hands. Or, more precisely, left from the wrong hands." There are several recent cases of sea turtles, seals and sea lions off the California coast discovered entangled in or choked by balloon strings, or in physical distress after ingesting balloons. Among the key findings of a 2020 Oceana report on ocean plastic was that balloons were one of the most common types of plastics entangling or consumed by marine life, along with bags, recreational fishing line, sheeting and food wrappers.

The threat to sea life is one of the main reasons a handful of coastal Southern California cities have slapped restrictions on the use of balloons, ranging from prohibiting the sale or release of lighter-than-air balloons (which generally means those filled with helium) to a ban on the sale, distribution or public use of all balloons passed by Laguna Beach on Tuesday.

If this trend sounds familiar, that's because a few years back it was single-use plastic straws that were targeted by local bans. Eventually, there were so many different rules about distribution of plastic disposable straws that a statewide law, beginning in 2019, made sense. Balloons may be heading for the same fate....

California will phase out mylar balloons by 2031 because their metallic nylon foil shells have a tendency to cause blackouts and spark wildfires when they float into power lines. That's good, but now California legislators should consider placing restrictions on the use and release of latex balloons. The balloon industry markets latex rubber balloons as biodegradable, but studies have found that they don't break down in the ocean. Furthermore, the strings attached to balloons are generally plastic. This makes them single-use trash in the same way that grocery bags and straws are, and releasing them into the environment is littering.
A Laguna Beach environmentalist tells the Times people need to rethink the way they look at plastic. "When people say they throw things away — there's really no away."

In a keynote at FOSDEM 2023, NASA's science data officer Steve Crawford explored NASA's use of open-source software.

But LWN.net notes that the talk went far beyond just the calibration software for the James Webb Space Telescope and the Mars Ingenuity copter's flight-control framework. In his talk, Crawford presented NASA's Open-Source Science Initiative. Its goal is to support scientists to help them integrate open-science principles into the entire research workflow. Just a few weeks before Crawford's talk, NASA's Science Mission Directorate published its new policy on scientific information.

Crawford summarized this policy with "as open as possible, as restricted as necessary, always secure", and he made this more concrete: "Publications should be made openly available with no embargo period, including research data and software. Data should be released with a Creative Commons Zero license, and software with a commonly used permissive license, such as Apache, BSD, or MIT. The new policy also encourages using and contributing to open-source software." Crawford added that NASA's policies will be updated to make it clear that employees can contribute to open-source projects in their official capacity....

As part of its Open-Source Science Initiative, NASA has started its five-year Transform to Open Science (TOPS) mission. This is a $40-million mission to speed up adoption of open-science practices; it starts with the White House and all major US federal agencies, including NASA, declaring 2023 as the "Year of Open Science". One of NASA's strategic goals with TOPS is to enable five major scientific discoveries through open-science principles, Crawford said.
Interesting tidbit from the article: "In 2003 NASA created a license to enable the release of software by civil servants, the NASA Open Source Agreement. This license has been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), but the Free Software Foundation doesn't consider it a free-software license because it does not allow changes to the code that come from third-party free-software projects."

Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the article!

Two non-profit news site, the Markup and Grist, have co-published their investigation into how big tech rewrote America's first cellphone repair law.

"That New York passed any electronics right-to-repair bill is 'huge,' Repair.org executive director Gay Gordon-Byrne told Grist. But 'it could have been huger' if not for tech industry interference." The passage of the Digital Fair Repair Act last June reportedly caught the tech industry off guard, but it had time to act before Governor Kathy Hochul would sign it into law. Corporate lobbyists went to work, pressing for exemptions and changes that would water the bill down. They were largely successful: While the bill Hochul signed in late December remains a victory for the right-to-repair movement, the more corporate-friendly text gives consumers and independent repair shops less access to parts and tools than the original proposal called for. (The state Senate still has to vote to adopt the revised bill, but it's widely expected to do so.)

The new version of the law applies only to devices built after mid-2023, so it won't help people to fix stuff they currently own. It also exempts electronics used exclusively by businesses or the government. All those devices are likely to become electronic waste faster than they would have had Hochul, a Democrat, signed a tougher bill. And more greenhouse gases will be emitted manufacturing new devices to replace broken electronics....

Jessa Jones, who founded iPad Rehab, an independent repair shop in Honeoye Falls, about 20 miles south of Rochester, New York, says the original bill included provisions that would have made it far easier for independent shops like hers to get the tools, parts, and know-how needed to make repairs. She pointed to changes that allow manufacturers to release repair tools that only work with spare parts they make, while at the same time controlling how those spare parts are used... "If you keep going down this road, allowing manufacturers to force us to use their branded parts and service, where they're allowed to tie the function of the device to their branded parts and service, that's not repair," Jones said. "That's authoritarian control."
The bill's sponsor believes it could create momentum for dozens of other states trying to pass similar laws, the article points out, possibly leading ultimately to one national agreement between electronics manufacturers and the repair community. A lawmaker from another state argued that New York's law "gives us something to work from. We're going to take that now and try to do a better piece of legislation."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for submitting the article.

The US' Energy Information Agency (EIA) expects the nation's electrical grid to add more power (just under 55 GW), "and solar will be over half of it, at 54 percent," reports Ars Technica. "Another trend that's apparent is the reversal of the vast expansion in natural gas use following the development of fracking." From the report: In most areas of the country, solar is now the cheapest way to generate power, and the grid additions reflect that. The EIA also indicates that at least some of these are projects that were delayed due to pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions. As has been typical, Texas and California will account for the lion's share of the 29 GW of new capacity, with Texas alone adding 7.7 GW, and California another 4.2 GW. Another trend that's apparent is the reversal of the vast expansion in natural gas use following the development of fracking. Last year, natural gas generation accounted for 9.6 GW of the new capacity; this year, that figure is shrinking to 7.5 GW. And, strikingly, the EIA indicates that 6.2 GW of natural gas generating capacity is going to be shut down this year, meaning that there's a net growth of only 1.2 GW. Should current trends continue, we may actually see a net decline in natural gas generating capacity next year.

The last big trend is the rapid growth of batteries. While these don't generate electricity, they are increasingly providing the equivalent function of a power plant, in the sense that they send power to the grid when it's needed. However you want to view them, they're booming, going from 11 percent of the new capacity last year (5.1 GW) to 17 percent this year. At 9.4 GW of new batteries, the additions have nearly doubled in just a year, pushing the new battery capacity ahead of natural gas and into second place. While it doesn't represent a trend, there's also big news for nuclear power: The last two reactors that had been under construction at the Vogtle site in Georgia will be coming online. Their operators expect that one of the 1.1 GW plants will start operating in March, and the second in December. Given the plant's history of delays, it will be no surprise if the latter slips into next year.

The other major source of additions, wind power, appears to have entered a period of stagnation. It saw a burst of new construction at the start of the decade in advance of expiring tax credits. But, even though those credits were restored by the Inflation Reduction Act, construction of new facilities hasn't returned to its previous levels. Only six gigawatts of new wind are expected this year, down slightly from last year. Things may pick up in the second half of the decade as planners take the Inflation Reduction Act into account and offshore wind facilities start construction. The final piece of the story is the continued decline in coal plants. No new ones will be completed this year, and none are in planning. By contrast, nearly nine gigawatts of existing coal facilities will be shut down.

Ryan Graves, former Lt. U.S. Navy and F/A-18F pilot who was the first active-duty fighter pilot to come forward publicly about regular sightings of UAP, says more data is needed about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). "We should encourage pilots and other witnesses to come forward and keep the pressure on Congress to prioritize UAP as a matter of national security," writes Graves in an opinion piece for The Hill. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from his report: As a former U.S. Navy F/A-18 fighter pilot who witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) on a regular basis, let me be clear. The U.S. government, former presidents, members of Congress of both political parties and directors of national intelligence are trying to tell the American public the same uncomfortable truth I shared: Objects demonstrating extreme capabilities routinely fly over our military facilities and training ranges. We don't know what they are, and we are unable to mitigate their presence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) last week published its second ever report on UAP activity. While the unclassified version is brief, its findings are sobering. Over the past year, the government has collected hundreds of new reports of enigmatic objects from military pilots and sensor systems that cannot be identified and "represent a hazard to flight safety." The report also preserves last year's review of the 26-year reporting period that some UAP may represent advanced technology, noting "unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities."

Mysteriously, no UAP reports have been confirmed to be foreign so far. However, just this past week, a Chinese surveillance balloon shut down air traffic across the United States. How are we supposed to make sense of hundreds of reports of UAP that violate restricted airspace uncontested and interfere with both civilian and military pilots? Here is the hard truth. We don't know. UAP are a national security problem, and we urgently need more data.

Why don't we have more data? Stigma. I know the fear of stigma is a major problem because I was the first active-duty fighter pilot to come forward publicly about regular sightings of UAP, and it was not easy. There has been little support or incentive for aircrew to speak publicly on this topic. There was no upside to reporting hard-to-explain sightings within the chain of command, let alone doing so publicly. For pilots to feel comfortable, it will require a culture shift inside organizations and in society at large. I have seen for myself on radar and talked with the pilots who have experienced near misses with mysterious objects off the Eastern Seaboard that have triggered unsafe evasive actions and mandatory safety reports. There were 50 or 60 people who flew with me in 2014-2015 and could tell you they saw UAP every day. Yet only one other pilot has confirmed this publicly. I spoke out publicly in 2019, at great risk personally and professionally, because nothing was being done. The ODNI report itself notes that concentrated efforts to reduce stigma have been a major reason for the increase in reports this year. To get the data and analyze it scientifically, we must uproot the lingering cultural stigma of tin foil hats and "UFOs" from the 1950s that stops pilots from reporting the phenomena and scientists from studying it. Last September, the U.S. Navy said that all of the government's UFO videos are classified information and releasing any additional UFO videos would "harm national security."

An anonymous reader shares a report from Ars Technica: Over the years, King of Kong star Billy Mitchell has seen his world-record Donkey Kong scores stripped, partially reinstated, and endlessly litigated, both in actual court and the court of public opinion. Through it all, Mitchell has insisted that every one of his records was set on unmodified Donkey Kong arcade hardware, despite some convincing technical evidence to the contrary.

Now, new photos from a 2007 performance by Mitchell seem to show obvious modifications to the machine used to earn at least one of those scores, a fascinating new piece of evidence in the long, contentious battle over Mitchell's place in Donkey Kong score-chasing history.

The photos in question were taken at the Florida Association of Mortgage Brokers (FAMB) Convention, which hosted Mitchell as part of its "80s Arcade Night" promotion in July 2007. Mitchell claims to have achieved a score of 1,050,200 points at that event, a performance that was recognized by adjudicator Twin Galaxies as a world record at the time (but which by now would barely crack the top 30). In his defamation case against Twin Galaxies, Mitchell includes testimony from several purported witnesses to his FAMB performance. That includes former Twin Galaxies referee Todd Rogers (who was later also banned from Twin Galaxies), who testified that the machine used at the event was "an original Nintendo Donkey Kong Arcade machine as I have known since 1981."

But the pictures from the FAMB convention, made public by fellow high-score-chaser David Race last month, raise additional questions about that claim, thanks to what Race calls a "glaringly non-original joystick" seen in the machine shown in those photos.

In 2003 a 20-year-old Ryan North began writing new dialogue, three days a week, for the exact same set of six drawings of talking dinosaurs. And twenty years later, he's still doing it!

Interestingly, North found the original six drawings on a clip-art CD. So honoring this strange milestone, he's created a special edition in which the online comic strip finally continues beyond its sixth frame: I fired up a virtual machine running Windows XP which ITSELF was tweaking its settings to run Windows 95, which ITSELF was running the Windows 3.1 software I first used in the last few days of January to make myself a comics layout, and started playing around. (Incidentally, the comic's still laid out in MS Paint, but the version that came with XP...

After 20 years I'm allowed to change the images BRIEFLY. And only once!!
While readers laugh along with T-Rex, Utahraptor and Dromiceiomimus, North is experiencing this milestone as "incredible," while also adding "I'm so grateful for everyone who reads my work." Writing Dinosaur Comics has led to so many amazing things - not just meeting readers, not just seeing plush versions of T-Rex go up to the edge of space or to Antarctica... [Y]ou can trace a direct line between me sending an upload command to my FTP client in 2003 and everything I've done since, and if you told me back then that "hey, the Dinosaur Comics guy is going to write Star Trek comics and adopt Vonnegut into comics too and write bestselling (and non-fiction!) guides to both time travel and taking over the world and, oh, let's say be the new writer for the Fantastic Four AND MORE" I would've said "What?! I would like to be the Dinosaur Comics guy, thank you so much."
Looking back to 2003, North also reflects that "The world of online comics is very different from how it was when I started." [T]here's been a huge shift towards social media - functioning effectively as an aggregator - and a huge shift away from people actually visiting websites. But I love websites, and I think they give us the healthiest, most free version of the web, and I hope 20 years from now the only way to connect with other people won't be through a corporate or algorithmically-mediated platform.
And he adds that he hopes he'll still be writing the comic on its 40th anniversary in the year 2043.