joshuark shares a report from Ars Technica: For the better part of two months last year, most of us had no idea how serious the problems were with Boeing's Starliner spacecraft docked at the International Space Station. A safety advisory panel found this uncertainty also filtered through NASA's workforce. [...] The Starliner capsule was beset by problems with its maneuvering thrusters and pernicious helium leaks on its 27-hour trip from the launch pad to the ISS. For a short time, Starliner commander Wilmore lost his ability to control the movements of his spacecraft as it moved in for docking at the station in June 2024. Engineers determined that some of the thrusters were overheating and eventually recovered most of their function, allowing Starliner to dock with the ISS. [...] Throughout that summer, managers from NASA and Boeing repeatedly stated that the spacecraft was safe to bring Wilmore and Williams home if the station needed to be evacuated in an emergency. But officials on the ground ordered extensive testing to understand the root of the problems. Buried behind the headlines, there was a real chance NASA managers would decide -- as they ultimately did -- not to put astronauts on Boeing's crew capsule when it was time to depart the ISS. [...] It would have been better, [Charlie Precourt, a former space shuttle commander and now a member of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP)] and other panel members said Friday, if NASA made a formal declaration of an in-flight "mishap" or "high visibility close call" soon after the Starliner spacecraft's troubled rendezvous with the ISS. Such a declaration would have elevated responsibility for the investigation to NASA's safety office. [...] After months of testing and analysis, NASA officials were unsure if the thruster problems would recur on Starliner's flight home. They decided in August 2024 to return the spacecraft to the ground without the astronauts, and the capsule safely landed in New Mexico the following month. The next Starliner flight will carry only cargo to the ISS. The safety panel recommended that NASA review its criteria and processes to ensure the language is "unambiguous" in requiring the agency to declare an in-flight mishap or a high-visibility close call for any event involving NASA personnel "that leads to an impact on crew or spacecraft safety."

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Tony Isaac shares a report from NPR: The U.S. government calculates the country's official time using more than a dozen atomic clocks at a federal facility northwest of Denver. But when a destructive windstorm knocked out power to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) laboratory in Boulder on Wednesday and a backup generator subsequently failed, time ever so slightly slowed down. The lapse "resulted in NIST UTC [universal coordinated time] being 4.8 microseconds slower than it should have been," NIST spokesperson Rebecca Jacobson said in an email. [...] Since 2007, the official time of the U.S. has been determined by the commerce secretary, who oversees NIST, along with the U.S. Navy. The national time standard is known as NIST UTC. (Somewhat confusingly, UTC itself is a separate, global time standard to which the U.S. and other countries contribute measurements.) NIST currently calculates the standard using a weighted average of the readings of 16 atomic clocks situated across the Boulder campus. Atomic clocks, including hydrogen masers and cesium beam clocks, rely on the natural resonant frequencies of atoms to tell time with extremely high accuracy. All of the atomic clocks continued ticking through the power outage last week thanks to their battery backup systems, according to NIST supervisory research physicist Jeff Sherman. What failed was the connection between some of the clocks and NIST's measurement and distribution systems, he said. Some critical operations staff who were still on site following the severe weather were able to restore backup power by activating a diesel generator the team had kept in reserve, Sherman said.

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We've talked about the For-Case anti-pattern many, many times. And while we've seen some wild variations, and some pretty hideous versions, I think we have yet to see the exact example Ashley H sends us:

for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++) { if (i == 0) { step1(); } else if (i == 1) { step2(); } else if (i == 2) { step3(); } else if (i == 3){ finalStep(); } }

The specific names of the functions have been anonymized, but this illustrates the key points of what Ashley found.

It's been in the code base for some time, so she's not entirely certain where it came from, or what the company's code review practices were like at the time.

You see, this kind of code doesn't appear fully formed. It gets created, one step, after another, after another, after another. It's like a loop, but… uh… in a line. Without looping.

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"Garmin's Collier Trophy award-winning Autonomi emergency Autoland, a system designed to safely land an aircraft in the event of pilot incapacitation, made its first real-world use and save on Saturday," writes Slashdot reader slipped_bit. AvBrief.com reports: Social media posts from flight tracking hobbyists reported a King Air 200 squawked 7700 about 2 p.m. local time today. The Autoland system was initiated and landed the aircraft at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport near Denver. A recording from LiveATC's feed of the airport's tower frequency includes a robotic female voice declaring a pilot incapacitation and the intention to land on Runway 30. The aircraft landed successfully and there have been no reports of injuries. The nature of the incapacitation and the condition of the pilot have not been released. VASAviation put together this nice animation of the event [here]. The aircraft, N479BR, was being operated by Buffalo River Outfitters from Aspen to Rocky Mountain Metropolitan. It's not clear how many people were on board. The system appeared to work flawlessly, and the controller at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan seemed to take it in stride, accommodating as many requests as he could before shutting down the airport for the landing.

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The FCC has banned approval of new foreign-made drones and components, citing "an unacceptable risk" to national security. The move will most heavily impact DJI but it "does not affect drones or drone components that are currently sold in the United States." Reuters reports: The tech was placed on the commission's "Covered List," barring DJI and other foreign drone manufacturers from receiving the FCC's approval to sell new drone models for import or sale in the U.S. In Monday's announcement, the agency said that the move "will reduce the risk of direct [drone] attacks and disruptions, unauthorized surveillance, sensitive data exfiltration and other [drone] threats to the homeland." FCC Chair Brendan Carr said in a statement that while drones offer the potential to boost public safety and the U.S.' posture on global innovation, "criminals, terrorists and hostile foreign actors have intensified their weaponization of these technologies, creating new and serious threats to our homeland." The ruling comes as China hawks in Congress amplify warnings about the security risks of drones made by DJI, which accounts for more than 90% of the global market share. But efforts to crack down on Capitol Hill have been met with some pushback due to the potential impacts of curbing the drone usage on U.S. businesses and law enforcement. A wide variety of sectors, including construction, energy, agriculture and mining companies, as well as local police and fire departments across the country, deploy DJI-made drones.

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Microsoft plans to eliminate all C and C++ code across its major codebases by 2030, replacing it with Rust using AI-assisted, large-scale refactoring. "My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030," Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. "Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases. Our North Star is '1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.' To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we've built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding." Hunt says he's looking to hire a Principal Software Engineer to help with this effort. "The purpose of this Principal Software Engineer role is to help us evolve and augment our infrastructure to enable translating Microsoft's largest C and C++ systems to Rust," writes Hunt. "A critical requirement for this role is experience building production quality systems-level code in Rust -- preferably at least 3 years of experience writing systems-level code in Rust. Compiler, database, or OS implementation experience is highly desired. While compiler implementation experience is not required to apply, the willingness to acquire that experience in our team is required."

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Alphabet is acquiring Intersect for $4.75 billion to accelerate data center and power-generation capacity as AI infrastructure demand surges. CNBC reports: Alphabet said Intersect's operations will remain independent, but that the acquisition will help bring more data center and generation capacity online faster. "Intersect will help us expand capacity, operate more nimbly in building new power generation in lockstep with new data center load, and reimagine energy solutions to drive U.S. innovation and leadership," Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said in a statement. Google already had a minority stake in Intersect from a funding round that was announced last December. In a release at the time, Intersect said its strategic partnership with Google and TPG Rise Climate aimed to develop gigawatts of data center capacity across the U.S., including a $20 billion investment in renewable power infrastructure by the end of the decade. Alphabet said Monday that Intersect will work closely with Google's technical infrastructure team, including on the companies' co-located power site and data center in Haskell County, Texas. Google previously announced a $40 billion investment in Texas through 2027, which includes new data center campuses in the state's Haskell and Armstrong counties.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: With just three days to go before Christmas, a cyberattack knocked France's national postal service offline Monday, blocking and delaying package deliveries and online payments. The timing was miserable for millions of people at the height of the Christmas season, as frazzled postal workers fended off frustrated customers. No one immediately claimed responsibility, but suspicions abounded. What the postal service La Poste called a ''major network incident'' remained unresolved by Monday evening, more than eight hours after it was first reported. For a company that delivered 2.6 billion packages last year and employs more than 200,000 people, that's a big hit. La Poste said in a statement that a distributed denial of service incident, or DDoS, "rendered its online services inaccessible." It said the incident had no impact on customer data, but disrupted package delivery. Letters, including holiday greeting cards, could still be mailed and delivered. But transactions requiring tracking or access to the postal service internal computer systems were impossible. The cyberattack also hurt online banking. Customers of the company's banking arm, La Banque Postale, were blocked from using the application to approve payments or conduct other banking services. The bank redirected approvals to text messages instead. "Our teams are mobilized to resolve the situation quickly," the bank said in messages posted on social networks. The disruption came a week after France's government was targeted by a cyberattack that targeted the Interior Ministry, in charge of national security.

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Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has personally guaranteed $40.4 billion to shore up Paramount's bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, trying to ease financing doubts as Warner Bros weighs a rival offer from Netflix. Reuters reports: Paramount said the amended terms do not change the $30-per-share all-cash offer even as the fight for Hollywood's sought-after assets heats up, with control of Warner Bros' vast library offering a decisive edge in the streaming wars. "I doubt many Warner Bros shareholders that are on the fence or planning to vote no "were holding out due to issues the "revised bid addresses such as a guarantee from Larry Ellison on the funding front," said Seth Shafer, principal analyst at S&P Global. As part of the revised terms, Ellison also agreed not to revoke the family trust or transfer its assets during the pendency of the transaction, the filing showed. Paramount said it has raised its regulatory reverse termination fee to $5.8 billion from $5 billion to match the competing transaction and extended the expiration date of its tender offer to January 21, 2026. The "bid follows Warner Bros asking its shareholders to reject the $108.4 billion offer from Paramount for the whole company, including cable TV assets, on doubts over its financing and the lack of a full guarantee from the Ellison family. But Warner Bros investors, including the fifth largest shareholder Harris Associates, have said they would be open to revised offers from Paramount if it presents a superior bid and addresses issues with deal terms. Under the Netflix agreement, Warner Bros would owe Netflix $2.8 billion as breakup fee if it walks away from that deal.

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Vince Zampella, the co-creator of Call of Duty and co-founder of Infinity Ward and Respawn Entertainment, died at 55 in a single-car accident in Los Angeles. According to NBC Los Angeles, "The single-car crash was reported at about 12:45 p.m. on the scenic road north of Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Mountains. The southbound car veered off the road, hit a concrete barrier and a passenger was ejected, the California Highway Patrol said. The driver was trapped in the ensuing car fire, the CHP said. The driver died at the scene and the passenger died at a hospital, authorities told NBC4 Investigates." IGN reports: Zampella was an incredibly talented game developer who changed the industry with Call of Duty, a franchise he co-created with Jason West in 2003 at Infinity Ward, the studio he co-founded with West, after previously serving as the lead designer for EA's Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Zampella was at the center of a high-profile lawsuit against Activision that alleged that the publisher owed Zampella and the Infinity Ward team millions of dollars in unpaid Call of Duty royalties. The bitter professional divorce led to Zampella and West taking a substantial number of the Infinity Ward team with them to EA, where they co-founded Respawn Entertainment, a studio that has produced nothing but critically acclaimed hits: Titanfall, Titanfall 2, Apex Legends, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Respawn's success under Zampella led to him getting promoted twice, eventually overseeing the Battlefield franchise within his role as Group General Manager at EA.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, the US Department of the Interior announced that it was pausing the leases on all five offshore wind sites currently under construction in the US. The move comes despite the fact that these projects already have installed significant hardware in the water and on land; one of them is nearly complete. In what appears to be an attempt to avoid legal scrutiny, the Interior is blaming the decisions on a classified report from the Department of Defense. The second Trump administration announced its animosity toward offshore wind power literally on day one, issuing an executive order on inauguration day that called for a temporary halt to issuing permits for new projects pending a re-evaluation. Earlier this month, however, a judge vacated that executive order, noting that the government has shown no indication that it was even attempting to start the re-evaluation it said was needed. But a number of projects have gone through the entire permitting process, and construction has started. Before today, the administration had attempted to stop these in an erratic, halting manner. Empire Wind, an 800 MW farm being built off New York, was stopped by the Department of the Interior, which alleged that it had been rushed through permitting. That hold was lifted following lobbying and negotiations by New York and the project developer Orsted, and the Department of the Interior never revealed why it changed its mind. When the Interior Department blocked a second Orsted project, Revolution Wind offshore of southern New England, the company took the government to court and won a ruling that let it continue construction. Today's announcement targets those and three other projects. Interior says it is pausing the permits for all five, which are the only projects currently under construction. It claims that offshore wind creates "national security risks" that were revealed in a recent analysis performed by the Department of Defense, which apparently neglected to identify these issues during the evaluations it did while the projects were first permitted. What are these risks? The Interior Department is being extremely coy. It notes that offshore wind turbines can interfere with radar sensing, but that's been known for a while. In announcing the decision, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum also noted "the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies." But the announcement says that the Defense Department analysis is classified, meaning nobody is likely to know what the actual reason is -- presuming one exists. The classification will also make it far more challenging to contest this decision in court.

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Abstract of a paper featured on NBER: How has aggregate income and welfare in the United States been affected by globalization and rapid productivity growth in emerging economies? We use the class of constant elasticity trade models to provide quantitative evidence on these questions. We find that reductions in worldwide trade frictions over the period from 1960-2020 reduced the share of the United States in global GDP but raised its aggregate welfare. Similarly, productivity growth in Japan and China led to a decline in the relative income of the United States, but brought aggregate welfare gains from the resulting expansion in global production possibilities. Trade integration and foreign productivity growth have relatively modest effects on domestic income and welfare compared to domestic productivity growth.

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Australian restaurants facing a mounting cost-of-doing-business crisis are turning to automatic service charges as a way to shore up revenue. The practice is legal under Australian consumer law as long as customers are notified beforehand and can opt out, but it risks alienating diners in a country where tipping has traditionally been optional. Wes Lambert, chief executive of the Australian Cafe and Restaurant Association, said only a handful of businesses in central business districts currently add automatic tips to bills, but the practice may spread as cost pressures continue. Automatic tipping is more common at venues frequented by international tourists, who view the practice as normal rather than exceptional. With international tourism now near pre-COVID levels, Lambert expects more restaurants to include tips on bills by default. A Sydney wine bar recently abandoned its 10 per cent automatic tip after a diner's social media post triggered public backlash. University of New South Wales professor Rob Nichols said Australia's resistance to tipping stems from the expectation that hospitality workers earn at least minimum wage, unlike in the United States where tips constitute most of a server's income. Australians and tourists tip an estimated $3.5 billion annually, and tipping transactions grew 13% year over year in fiscal 2024-25.

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If you watched Avatar: Fire and Ash in James Cameron's preferred high frame rate 3D format and noticed certain sequences appearing unusually smooth while others had the traditional cinematic look, that visual inconsistency is entirely intentional. The third Avatar film continues Cameron's frame rate experimentation from The Way of Water, selectively deploying 48 frames per second for underwater and flying sequences while keeping dialogue scenes at the standard 24 FPS. The human eye perceives somewhere between 30 and 60 FPS, meaning viewers can detect the shift between frame rates. Cameron argues the tradeoff is worth it: discomfort from 3D viewing isn't eye strain but "brain strain," caused when parallax-sensitive neurons struggle to process jumping vertical edges. Higher frame rates smooth this out. When critics questioned the approach, Cameron was characteristically blunt. "I think $2.3 billion says you might be wrong on that," he told DiscussingFilm, referencing The Way of Water's box office.

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Linux's share of the desktop market has climbed to as much as 11% by one count, but that figure includes Chromebooks, and the traditional Linux desktop remains hamstrung by the same fragmentation that killed Unix decades ago. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing in The Register, argues that the proliferation of Linux desktops -- more than a dozen significant interfaces exist today, and DistroWatch lists "upwards of a hundred" -- makes it nearly impossible for ordinary users to know where to start. Linus Torvalds has long agreed with this hypothesis. "We have way too many desktops," Vaughan-Nichols notes, summarizing Torvalds' position. The deeper issue lies in software delivery: traditional package managers like DEB and RPM "simply don't scale for the desktop," forcing distro builders to constantly rebuild programs for their specific environments. Containerized solutions like Flatpaks, Snaps and AppImages should solve this by bundling dependencies into universal packages, but the Linux community remains divided over which to adopt. Linux Mint, for instance, refuses Snap because "Canonical has too much control over the Snap store." Hardware support further complicates this challenges, the veteran journalist writes. While Dell sells Ubuntu machines and specialist vendors like System76 and TUXEDO Computers cater to enthusiasts, "none of them make it easy" for mainstream buyers, and no major OEM strongly backs Linux. Torvalds has pointed to Chromebooks and Android as the model: Linux won on smartphones because "there's a single, unified platform with a unified way to install programs."

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Instacart has ended its AI-powered pricing tests after a study from Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union revealed that the grocery delivery platform was showing different customers different prices for identical items at the same store. The company said Monday that retailers can no longer use Eversight, the AI pricing technology Instacart acquired in 2022, to run such tests. "Now, if two families are shopping for the same items, at the same time, from the same store location on Instacart, they see the same prices -- period," the company wrote in a blog post. The study drew attention from lawmakers; Sen. Chuck Schumer wrote to the FTC that "consumers deserve to know when they are being placed into pricing tests," and Reuters reported that the agency had opened an investigation. Instacart says the tests "were never based on supply or demand, personal data, demographics, or individual shopping behavior." The company also reached a $60 million settlement last week over separate allegations including falsely advertising free shipping.

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BrianFagioli writes: Visa says it has completed hundreds of secure, AI-initiated transactions with partners, arguing this proves agent driven shopping is ready to move beyond experiments. The company believes 2025 will be the last full year most consumers manually check out, with AI agents handling purchases at scale by the 2026 holiday season. Nearly half of US shoppers already use AI tools for product discovery, and Visa wants to extend that shift all the way through payment using its Intelligent Commerce framework. The pilots are already live in controlled environments, powering consumer and business purchases through AI agents tied to Visa's payment rails. To prevent abuse, Visa and partners have introduced a Trusted Agent Protocol to help merchants distinguish legitimate AI agents from bots, with Akamai adding fraud and identity controls. While the infrastructure may be ready, the bigger question is whether consumers fully understand the risks of letting software spend their money.

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The video games industry in 2025 finds itself caught between the familiar forces of consolidation and job losses that have plagued creative industries, and a newer development: governments and the ultra-wealthy have begun treating games as tools of political influence. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund closed a $55 billion deal for EA this year and acquired Niantic, the makers of Pokemon Go, in March. Microsoft's 2023 acquisition of Activision already signaled the direction of travel. The workforce has borne the costs of this consolidation. More than 5,000 jobs have been lost in the industry this year, and several studios have shuttered, including Monolith Productions. The instability has pushed unions into greater prominence: United Videogame Workers formed in the US and Canada in March as part of the Communications Workers of America, and the firing of 30 staff from Rockstar Games in the UK brought the IWGB Game Workers Union into the spotlight. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has posted AI-generated images of the president as Halo's Master Chief and used Pokemon and Halo memes to recruit for ICE.

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BrianFagioli writes: Samsung is bringing Google Gemini directly into the kitchen, starting with a refrigerator that can see what you eat. At CES 2026, the company plans to show off a new Bespoke AI Refrigerator that uses a built in camera system paired with Gemini to automatically recognize food items, including leftovers stored in unlabeled containers. The idea is to keep an always up to date inventory without manual input, track what is added or removed, and surface suggestions based on what is actually inside the fridge. It is the first time Google's Gemini AI is being integrated into a refrigerator, pushing generative AI well beyond phones and laptops.

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Beverly Hills High School has deployed an AI-powered surveillance apparatus that includes facial recognition cameras, behavioral analysis software, smoke detector-shaped bathroom listening devices from Motorola, drones, and license plate readers from Flock Safety -- a setup the district spent $4.8 million on in the 2024-2025 fiscal year and considers necessary given the school's high-profile location in Los Angeles. Similar systems are spreading to campuses nationwide as schools try to stop mass shootings that killed 49 people on school property this year, 59 in 2024, and 45 in 2023. A 2023 ACLU report found that eight of the ten largest school shootings since Columbine occurred at schools that already had surveillance systems, and 32% of students surveyed said they felt like they were always being watched. The technology has a spotty track record, however. Gun detection vendor Evolv, used by more than 800 schools including Beverly Hills High, was reprimanded by the FTC in 2024 for claiming its AI could detect all weapons after it failed to flag a seven-inch knife used to stab a student in 2022. Evolv has also flagged laptops and water bottles as guns. Rival vendor Omnilert flagged a 16-year-old student at a Maryland high school reaching for an empty Doritos bag as a possible gun threat; police held the teenager at gunpoint. Not every school is buying in. Highline Schools in Washington state cancelled its $33,000 annual ZeroEyes contract this year and spent the money on defibrillators and Ford SUVs for its safety team instead.

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