Mike Bouma writes: Version 1.7 of AROS One for x86 has just been released and it's a distro of the "AROS Research Operating System," originally "Amiga Research Operating System." It's a standalone, free and open-source multi-media centric operating system that's designed to be portable, flexible, efficient and lightweight and can be seen dual booting with Windows 10 on an Acer laptop here. The most popular AROS specific community portal is AROS Exec.

Parts of AROS were used to create the commercial PowerPC based Amiga-like operating system MorphOS, which has recently seen a new release as well, version 3.17. The most popular MorphOS specific community portal is MorphZone.

It was "the furthest any Right to Repair bill for consumer electronics has come to becoming law" in America, reports the nonprofit California Public Interest Research Group.

And yet... The California Senate Appropriations committee failed to pass Sen. Susan Eggman's Right to Repair bill, SB 983, on May 19, which would have significantly expanded Californians' access to the parts, tools, and service information needed to fix consumer electronics and appliances.... The policy had broad, bipartisan support, with 75% of Californians and majorities of both parties supporting Right to Repair. The bill, which passed through the judiciary committee with only a single opposing vote, met the same fate as a similarly popular medical Right to Repair bill that Sen. Eggman introduced in 2021. Sander Kushen, CALPIRG Advocate issued the following statement in response... "SB 983 could have saved California households as much as $4.3 billion a year in reduced spending on electronics and helped Californians reduce toxic electronic waste. Instead, industry groups' heavy lobbying effort helped to kill the bill."
"Other states are pursuing similar legislation and there's also a pending federal bill," reports the San Francisco Chronicle" The right-to-repair movement is gaining steam with President Biden as a vocal advocate. In July 2021, he asked the Federal Trade Commission to draft right-to-repair rules. The FTC said it will target repairs restrictions as antitrust violations.

In recent months, major tech players have opened up limited ways to help consumers fix stuff. Apple has said it will sell manuals, parts and tools but only to owners of the iPhone 12 and 13 models. Microsoft said it's looking into repair options for its computer accessories. Google will sell replacement parts for Pixel smartphones via iFixit, a self-described "wikipedia of repair."
But they also explore why the California bill failed: The legislative bill, which would have been the first of its kind in the United States, would have required makers of electronic gear such as cell phones, game consoles, washers and dryers, computers — almost anything with a chip inside — to ease the route to fixing broken stuff by providing parts, tools and manuals at reasonable prices. Supporters pitched it as a no-brainer to save consumers money and reduce e-waste.

But the electronics industry says that it could have created a free-for-all, allowing pirates to flourish, unauthorized people to access sensitive information and trade secrets to be violated... "We're going up against the rights of some of the biggest companies in the world," said Kevin O'Reilly, a Right to Repair campaign director with U.S. Public Interest Research Group, or PIRG. He's also associated with CALPIRG. "Apple and Google and other tech giants have either lobbied against the bill or supported organizations that lobbied against the bill."

Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) writes: AmiKit is a compilation of pre-installed and pre-configured Amiga programs running emulated on Windows, macOS, and Linux (as well as running on classic 68K Amigas expanded with a Vampire upgrade card).

Besides original Workbench (Commodore's desktop environment/graphical filemanager), AmiKit provides Directory Opus Magellan and Scalos as desktop replacements and its "Rabbit Hole" feature allows you to launch Windows, Mac or Linux applications directly from your Amiga desktop! Anti-aliased fonts, Full HD 32-bit screen modes and DualPNG Icons support is included and this package comes with exclusive versions of the Master Control Program (MCP) and MUI 5 (Magic User Interface).

The original AmigaOS (version 3.x) and Kickstart ROM (version 3.1) are required, also the recently released AmigaOS 3.2 is supported. You can also get the needed files from the Amiga Forever package(s). It even supports emulating AmigaOS 4.x (for PowerPC) easily through Flower Pot.

Here's an extensive overview video by Dan Wood. An Amiga Future review of an earlier 2017 version can be read here.
"Everything began in 1994 when my parents bought an Amiga 500 for me and my brother," explains AmiKit's developer.

"I was 14 years old..." Fast forward to 2005, the AmiKit was born — an emulated environment including more than 350 programs. It fully replaced my old Amiga and it became a legend in the community over the years.

Fast forward to 2017, a brand new AmiKit X is released, originally developed for A.L.I.C.E., followed by the XE version released in 2019, Vampire edition in 2020 and Raspberry Pi in 2021. The latest & greatest version was released in 2020.

When someone, who has never heard about Amiga before, asks me why I would want to turn current modern computer into something retro and old fashioned, my short answer is: "Simply because I love Amiga!"

Would you drink a glass of Klingon Blood Wine? Or Cardassian Kanar Red Blend? Maybe you'd prefer the Andorian Blue Premium Chardonnay, or the United Federation of Planets Special Reserve Sauvignon Blanc...

Star Trek wines — a collaboration between CBS Consumer Products and Wines That Rock — has now added those four new flavors to their original two (which Ars Technica described as "far better than we expected, although very much over-priced.") So Ars hosted a wine tasting including the new wines, with their six testers joining "Q himself — aka actor John de Lancie." Also taste-testing was The Orville writer Andre Bormanis (a former science advisor for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise).

"Wine assessments were anonymous, in keeping with the gathering's super-casual vibe. And the wine was purchased out of pocket, not gifted for promotional purposes."

They'd tried this once before in 2019. Their three-year mission? To explore strange new wines... Next up: A Bordeaux blend from Chateau Picard (although the label claims it's a 2386 vintage to keep the conceit going): 85 percent cabernet and 15 percent merlot. As I noted [in 2019], this is a bona fide winery, with a centuries-old vineyard in the St.-Estephe region. It just so happens that Jean-Luc Picard's family has long run a fictional vineyard of the same name, albeit in the Burgundy region rather than Bordeaux — it features prominently in Picard. The real winery agreed to collaborate on a special edition of their cru bourgeois vintage for the Star Trek collection.

The Bordeaux blend also came out on top with the 2022 tasting crew, who declared it "perfectly quaffable" and "surprisingly good." The wine is light and dry, "easy on the palate," with "a clean finish," and fairly well balanced. It's almost as if Bordeaux wine makers have had centuries of experience to draw upon. This was the only bottle the tasting crew polished off completely.

Alas, the four new varieties in the Star Trek wine collection fall far, far short of their predecessors....

I will give the Star Trek Wine folks props for creative bottle design, especially the corkscrew shape of the Cardassian blend. The broad consensus was that the Klingon Blood Wine is trying to be a pinot noir and falling short; it's basically a very fruity California cabernet, with perhaps a hint of pepper. "Whoever supplied this blood ate nothing but fruit salad the week prior," one taster noted, with another simply writing, "Way too sweet." The most generous assessment was that it is "drinkable but not extraordinary...."

With the evergreen caveat that taste in wine is highly subjective, here's our recommendation. Stick with the original two bottles for your Star Trek wine, or save yourself some money and get something comparable for a fraction of the price — unless, of course, you're really keen to collect the whole set of unusual bottle designs. Or you're a Cardassian who loves really sweet wine.
Meanwhile, William Shatner himself is raising money for charity by auctioning off a bottle of "James T. Kirk" whiskey — the actual prop used on Star Trek: Picard. "The bottle does not contain real Bourbon just a colored liquid," its description notes — but the bottle has actually been autographed by 91-year-old Shatner.

Industry trade group the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC) could be dropping the "cable" moniker as it eyes a potential name change. Fierce Video reports: A trademark application filed by NCTC on May 17 shows one proposal for a new name: National Content & Technology Cooperative. An NCTC spokesperson confirmed to Fierce that the organization will be changing its name, but said it is considering a large number of options and hasn't yet settled on a final decision. The spokesperson noted it's taking time to register potential names, but some of the other choices on the table include simply "NCTC," "NCTC Online" or even sticking with its current brand of the National Cable Television Cooperative. [...] According to the application, it appears NCTC is also considering losing the image of a coaxial cable that's currently featured in its logo.

So why the potential shift away from cable? One factor could be that the industry has clearly changed since NCTC formed in 1984, with cable operators in recent years deemphasizing traditional video offerings. The "Cable Television" part of the group's name is becoming less accurate over time, said Brett Sappington, VP of Interpret. "Broadband, not television, is the cash cow for the cable industry," he told Fierce Video. "Many of the organization's members are actually moving away from offering their own video service and are, instead, focusing on broadband bundled with streaming services." [...] Along with industry changes come some shifts in perception as well. "Cable TV doesn't necessarily have a positive connotation today," Sappington noted. "In fact, many online TV services such as Sling TV or FuboTV emphasize why consumers should 'drop cable' and go with their services instead," he continued.

Researchers may have pinpointed the source of a famous supposed alien broadcast discovered nearly a half century ago. Space.com reports: The prominent and still-mysterious Wow! Signal, which briefly blared in a radio telescope the night of Aug. 15, 1977, may have come from a sun-like star located 1,800 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. "The Wow! Signal is considered the best SETI (or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) candidate radio signal that we have picked up with our telescopes," Alberto Caballero, an amateur astronomer, told Live Science. [...] The Wow! Signal most likely came from some kind of natural event and not aliens, Caballero told Live Science, though astronomers have ruled out a few possible origins like a passing comet. Still, Caballero noted that in our infrequent attempts to say hello to E.T., humans have mostly produced one-time broadcasts, such as the Arecibo message sent toward the globular star cluster M13 in 1974. The Wow! Signal may have been something similar, he added.

Knowing that the Big Ear telescope's two receivers were pointing in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius on the night of the Wow! Signal, Caballero decided to search through a catalog of stars from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite to look for possible candidates. "I found specifically one sun-like star," he said, an object designated 2MASS 19281982-2640123 about 1,800 light-years away that has a temperature, diameter and luminosity almost identical to our own stellar companion. Caballero's findings appeared May 6 in the International Journal of Astrobiology. "I think this is perfectly worth doing because we want to point our instruments in the direction of things we think are interesting," Rebecca Charbonneau, a historian who studies SETI at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and who wasn't involved in the work, told Live Science. "There are billions of stars in the galaxy, and we have to figure out some way to narrow them down," she added.

But she wonders if looking for only sun-like stars is too limiting. "Why not just look at a bunch of stars?" she asked.

Researchers from the University of Gottingen have published new calculations of the physics of the sun's atmosphere that resolve the apparent contradiction between the modern standard model of solar evolution and the "tried-and-true" method called spectral analysis. "The new calculations of the physics of the sun's atmosphere yield updated results for abundances of different chemical elements, which resolve the conflict," reports Phys.Org. "Notably, the sun contains more oxygen, silicon and neon than previously thought. The methods employed also promise considerably more accurate estimates of the chemical compositions of stars in general." From the report: Highly accurate helioseismic measurements gave results about the sun's interior structure that were at odds with the solar standard models. According to helioseismology, the so-called convective region within our sun where matter rises and sinks down again, like water in a boiling pot, was considerably larger than the standard model predicted. The speed of sound waves near the bottom of that region also deviated from the standard model's predictions, as did the overall amount of helium in the sun. To top it off, certain measurements of solar neutrinos -- fleeting elementary particles, hard to detect, reaching us directly from the sun's core regions -- were slightly off compared to experimental data, as well. Astronomers had what they soon came to call a "solar abundances crisis," and in search of a way out, some proposals ranged from the unusual to the downright exotic. Did the sun maybe accrete some metal-poor gas during its planet-forming phase? Is energy being transported by the notoriously non-interacting dark matter particles?

The newly published study by Ekaterina Magg, Maria Bergemann and colleagues has managed to resolve that crisis, by revisiting the models on which the spectral estimates of the sun's chemical composition are based. [...] In this study they tracked all chemical elements that are relevant to the current models of how stars evolved over time, and applied multiple independent methods to describe the interactions between the sun's atoms and its radiation field in order to make sure their results were consistent. For describing the convective regions of our sun, they used existing simulations that take into account both the motion of the plasma and the physics of radiation ("STAGGER" and "CO5BOLD"). For the comparison with spectral measurements, they chose the data set with the highest available quality: the solar spectrum published by the Institute for Astro- and Geophysics, University of GÃttingen. "We also extensively focused on the analysis of statistical and systematic effects that could limit the accuracy of out results," notes Magg. The new calculations showed that the relationship between the abundances of these crucial chemical elements and the strength of the corresponding spectral lines was significantly different from what previous authors had claimed. Consequently, the chemical abundances that follow from the observed solar spectrum are somewhat different than stated in previous analysis.

"We found, that according to our analysis the sun contains 26% more elements heavier than helium than previous studies had deduced," explains Magg. In astronomy, such elements heavier than helium are called "metals." Only on the order of a thousandth of a percent of all atomic nuclei in the sun are metals; it is this very small number that has now changed by 26% of its previous value. Magg adds: "The value for the oxygen abundance was almost 15% higher than in previous studies." The new values are, however, in good agreement with the chemical composition of primitive meteorites ("CI chondrites") that are thought to represent the chemical make-up of the very early solar system. When those new values are used as the input for current models of solar structure and evolution, the puzzling discrepancy between the results of those models and helioseismic measurements disappears.

After nearly 20 years, Hollywood Designer 6.0 is "very stable and mature", write its developers — envisioning both hobbyist and professional users (with its support for modern graphics-editing features like filter effects and vector graphics) in its massive new evolution.

Long-time Slashdot reader Mike Bouma explains: Airsoft Softwair has released Hollywood Designer 6.0, "a full-blown multimedia authoring system that runs on top of Hollywood and can be used to create all sorts of multimedia-based applications, for example presentations, slide shows, games, and applications. Thanks to Hollywood, all multimedia applications created using Hollywood Designer can be exported as stand-alone executables for the following systems: AmigaOS3, AmigaOS4, WarpOS, MorphOS, AROS, Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS."

The current version of Hollywood is v9.1 with various updated add-ons. To see earlier versions of Hollywood 9.0 & Designer 5.0 in action have a look at Kas1e's short demonstration on AmigaOS4 / AmigaOne X5000.

"Serial entrepreneur" Gary Vaynerchuk launched a four-day conference "exploring digital ownership and the way emerging technologies could interact with art, sports and entertainment," reports the Pioneer Press: It's billed as an event "featuring icons of business, sports, music, arts, Web3, and popular culture in conversation to build lasting relationships, share ideas, and connect with the community." VeeCon is expected to draw over 10,000 visitors from around world who will hear from 150 speakers, from New Age guru Deepak Chopra to filmmaker Spike Lee and the ubiquitous rapper Snoop Dogg. [Also speaking: Randi Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg's sister]

Tickets were sold in the form of NFTs, which are non-fungible tokens sold on the blockchain, a digital ledger of transactions. Much of the conference will dive into the potential applications for NFTs.

Ami Barzelay, chief product officer of Crinkle, a shopping rewards optimizer, described NFT ownership as "digital bragging rights." An NFT, which could be an image, song or video, can be copied and enjoyed by anyone in the world, but it may have just one owner. The NFT market, still in its infancy, has seen wild swings in what people are willing to pay for digital assets, which Barzelay has experienced first-hand. He said that for fun, he paid $100 for a video clip of Tiger Woods and later sold it for $5,000.

There is inherent skepticism and fear around buying and selling things that don't exist in the physical world, which VeeCon aims to address.
The article quotes Vaynerchuk as saying "Education and communication solve everything," adding later that "NFTs are really fun for collectability, but it is a tiny part of the consumer blockchain."

CNBC points out that holders of the NFT-format tickets "also are given exclusive access to the annual event for three years after the NFT's purchase." Though they also end on a skeptical note: "Right now the overwhelming energy of the space is very short term. I would call it greed. Many are not spending their time on education," Vaynerchuk said.

"The reality is that all that behavior is going to lead to 97-98% of these current projects losing value over the next 24-36 months because the supply and demand curves will not work out."
The event's schedule included happy hours that were officially hosted by Johnnie Walker and Captain Morgan.

On Twitter one attendee reported from the festival that digital artist Beeple "just got caked in the face in front of 7,000 people by Steve Aoki and it was incredible."

As Pwn2Own Vancouver comes to a close, a whopping $1,115,000 has been awarded by Trend Micro and Zero Day Initiative. The 15th anniversary edition saw 17 "contestants" attacking 21 targets, reports Hot Hardware — though "the biggest payouts were for serious exploits against Microsoft's Teams utility." While Teams isn't technically a part of Windows, it does come bundled with all new installs of Windows 11, which means that these exploits are practically Windows exploits. Hector "p3rr0" Peralta, Masato Kinugawa, and STAR Labs each earned $150,000 for major exploits of the utility.

Windows 11 itself wasn't spared, though. Marcin Wiazowski and STAR Labs each earned $40,000 for privilege escalation exploits on Microsoft's operating system on day one, and on day two, TO found a similar bug for a $40,000 payout of his own. Day three saw no less than three more fresh exploits against Windows 11, all in the serious privilege escalation category; all three winners pocketed another $40,000....

Other targets attacked at Pwn2Own 2022 included Mozilla Firefox (hacked), Apple Safari (hacked), and Ubuntu Desktop (hacked)... Of course, details of the hacks aren't made public, because they're zero-days, after all. That means that they haven't been patched yet, so releasing details of the exploits could allow malicious actors to make use of the bugs. Details will be revealed 3 months from now, during which time Microsoft, Tesla, Apple, and others should have their software all sewn up.
With all the points totalled, the winner was Singapore-based cybersecurity company Star Labs, which was officially crowned "Master of Pwn" on Saturday. "They won $270,000 and 27 points during the contest," explains the official Twitter feed for Zero Day Initiative (the judges for the event).

A blog post from Zero Day Initiative describes all 21 attacks, including six successful attacks against Windows, three successful attacks against Teams — and four against Ubuntu Desktop.

A remarkably literary critique of the internet appeared recently in Damage magazine — a project of the nonprofit Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry funded by the American Psychoanalytic Foundation. "There are ways in which the internet really does seem to work like a possessing demon..." argues writer Sam Kriss.

"We tend to think that the internet is a communications network we use to speak to one another — but in a sense, we're not doing anything of the sort. Instead, we are the ones being spoken through." Teens on TikTok all talk in the exact same tone, identical singsong smugness. Millennials on Twitter use the same shrinking vocabulary. My guy! Having a normal one! Even when you actually meet them in the sunlit world, they'll say valid or based, or say y'all despite being British....

Everything you say online is subject to an instant system of rewards. Every platform comes with metrics; you can precisely quantify how well-received your thoughts are by how many likes or shares or retweets they receive. For almost everyone, the game is difficult to resist: they end up trying to say the things that the machine will like. For all the panic over online censorship, this stuff is far more destructive. You have no free speech — not because someone might ban your account, but because there's a vast incentive structure in place that constantly channels your speech in certain directions. And unlike overt censorship, it's not a policy that could ever be changed, but a pure function of the connectivity of the internet itself. This might be why so much writing that comes out of the internet is so unbearably dull, cycling between outrage and mockery, begging for clicks, speaking the machine back into its own bowels....

The internet is not a communications system. Instead of delivering messages between people, it simulates the experience of being among people, in a way that books or shopping lists or even the telephone do not. And there are things that a simulation will always fail to capture. In the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, your ethical responsibility to other people emerges out of their face, the experience of looking directly into the face of another living subject. "The face is what prohibits us from killing...." But Facebook is a world without faces. Only images of faces; selfies, avatars: dead things. Or the moving image in a FaceTime chat: a haunted puppet. There is always something in the way. You are not talking to a person: the machine is talking, through you, to itself.

As more and more of your social life takes place online, you're training yourself to believe that other people are not really people, and you have no duty towards them whatsoever. These effects don't vanish once you look away from the screen.... many of the big conflicts within institutions in the last few years seem to be rooted in the expectation that the world should work like the internet. If you don't like a person, you should be able to block them: simply push a button, and have them disappear forever.
The article revisits a 2011 meta-analysis that found massive declines in young people's capacity for empathy, which the authors directly associated with the spread of social media. But then Kriss argues that "We are becoming less and less capable of actual intersubjective communication; more unhappy; more alone. Every year, surveys find that people have fewer and fewer friends; among millennials, 22% say they have none at all.

"For the first time in history, we can simply do without each other entirely. The machine supplies an approximation of everything you need for a bare biological existence: strangers come to deliver your food; AI chatbots deliver cognitive-behavioral therapy; social media simulates people to love and people to hate; and hidden inside the microcircuitry, the demons swarm..."

So while recent books look for historical antecedents, "I still think that the internet is a serious break from what we had before," Kriss argues. "And as nice as Wikipedia is, as nice as it is to be able to walk around foreign cities on Google Maps or read early modern grimoires without a library card, I still think the internet is a poison."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Today sees an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of 1970s children's programming giants Sid & Marty Krofft. (Born in 1929, Sid Krofft will turn 93 in July). And reportedly Marty Krofft has now partnered with NFT producer Orange Comet "in a multiyear contract to release NFTs based on the often enigmatic and much-beloved television shows they have brought to us since 1969."

The first one commemorates Land of the Lost — dropping sometime after September.

Today I learned their big break in America came from making puppets for Dean Martin's show, followed by designing and directing the Banana Splits and a string of successful children's shows on Saturday mornings. ( Land of the Lost, H.R. Pufunstuf, Lidsville, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters...) Looking back, Krofft muses that even today somewhere in New York City, "some guy 50 years old, remembers the damn theme songs. Because there were only three networks, so basically every kid in America saw our shows." In the article Marty Krofft describes their style as "a nightmare and bizarre" — or, more pragmatically, as "Disney without a budget" (while crediting future Disney CEO Michael Eisner for being their mentor).

Yet the article adds that "They were nearly unstoppable with styrofoam, paint and cloth. In a digital universe of truly endless possibilities, there is no telling where they could take their stories."

Paul Sawers writes via VentureBeat: It has been a frosty few years for Elastic and Amazon's AWS cloud computing arm, with the duo frequently locking horns over various issues relating to Elastic's ex-open-source database search engine -- Elasticsearch. To cut a War and Peace-esque story short, Amazon had introduced its own managed Elasticsearch service called Amazon Elasticsearch Service way back in 2015, and in the intervening years the "confusion" this (among other shenanigans) caused in the cloud sphere ultimately led Elastic to transition Elasticsearch from open source to "free and open" (i.e., a less permissive license), exerting more control over how the cloud giants of the world could use the product and Elasticsearch name. In response, Amazon launched an Elasticsearch "fork" called OpenSearch, and the two companies finally settled a long-standing trademark dispute, which effectively meant that Amazon would stop associating the Elasticsearch brand with Amazon's own products. This was an important final piece of the kiss-and-make-up puzzle, as it meant that customers searching for Elastic's fully-managed Elasticsearch service (Elastic Cloud) in the AWS Marketplace, wouldn't also stumble upon Amazon's incarnation and wonder which one they were actually looking for.

Fast-forward to today, and you would hardly know that the two companies were once at loggerheads. Over the past year, Elastic and Amazon have partnered to bring all manner of technologies and integrations to market, and they've worked to ensure that their shared customers can more easily onboard to Elastic Cloud within Amazon's infrastructure. Building on a commitment last month to make AWS and Elastic work even better together, Elastic and AWS today announced an even deeper collaboration, to "build, market and deliver" frictionless access to Elastic Cloud on AWS. In essence, this means that the two companies will go full-throttle on their "go-to-market" sales and marketing strategies -- this includes a new free 7-day trial for customers wanting to test-drive Elastic Cloud directly from the AWS Marketplace.

On top of that, AWS has committed to working with Elastic to generate new business across Amazon's various cloud-focused sales organizations -- this is a direct result of Elastic joining the AWS ISV Accelerate program. All of this has been made possible because of the clear and distinct products that now exist -- Amazon has OpenSearch, and Elastic has Elasticsearch, which makes collaboration that much easier. What does Amazon get for all of this? "Put simply, companies accessing Elastic's services on AWS infrastructure drive a lot of cloud consumption -- which translates into ka-ching for Amazon," adds Sawers.

Calfornia already has 12 water desalination plants — with 15 more proposed, one local news station reported last year. "These plants, which experts say weren't viable or aren't as needed as they were 20 years ago, are being looked at now in a more critical light in the struggle to adapt to less rainfall and climate change."

In 2015 Slashdot covered the launch of a desalination plant in in Carlsbad, California. "56 million gallons a day," brags its web site now. "The Pacific is now on tap." And this year the same company, Poseidon Water, had wanted to build another desalination plant 60 miles north.

But the Associated Press reports it just hit a roadblock with the state's Coastal Commission. Poseidon's long-running proposal was supported by Governor Gavin Newsom but faced ardent opposition from environmentalists who said drawing in large amounts of ocean water and releasing salty discharge back into the ocean would kill billions of tiny marine organisms that make up the base of the food chain along a large swath of the coast. "The ocean is under attack" from climate change already, Commissioner Dayna Bochco said. "I cannot say in good conscience that this amount of damage is OK."

Other critics said the water would be too expensive and wasn't urgently needed in the area where it would be built, which is less dependent on state and federal water due to an ample aquifer and water recycling program.

Commissioners cited those issues in following a staff recommendation and rejecting the proposal. They also cited the energy cost of running the plant and the fact that it would sit in an earthquake fault zone.
The vote against the plant was unanimous, CNN reports. And yet... Commission staff did acknowledge in the report that its findings do not mean that the project is "unapprovable," nor that it is completely against desalination, writing: "Staff acknowledge the need to develop new, reliable sources of water in southern California, and believe that well-planned and sited desalination facilities will likely play a role in providing these supplies."
But CNN also notes California has other options: Research by the Pacific Institute, a water-focused think tank, found California could substantially reduce its urban water use by 30 to 48% with existing and cutting-edge technologies. In its recent report, the institute argued that "water efficiency opportunities can be found across the state but are highest in the South Coast hydrologic region." It pointed to solutions that cost very little compared to desalination, including increased wastewater recycling and stormwater capture — with about two-thirds of the region's potential water savings coming from the residential sector.

"Seawater desalination is among the most expensive water supply options," Heather Cooley, Pacific Institute's director of research, told CNN. "From a cost perspective, from an environmental one, from an energy perspective, doing these other alternatives first makes the most sense for California."
Thanks to Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the article!

"I first heard about Google here on Slashdot," writes Captain Chad (Slashdot reader #102,831).

"At the time I was using AltaVista for web searches, but Google immediately proved its superiority." Now 20+ years later I struggle with Google's latest system. It appears to be interpreting the perceived intent of my search request instead of using the very specific keywords I provide. I'm often getting results that aren't on the same topic as what I'm looking for, and adding more keywords seems to make it worse. Even using double quotes doesn't help much any more. Google Search has become too "intelligent" for me to use effectively.

So I'm looking for a replacement search engine, one that searches for what I tell it to search for, like Google used to do. With that in mind, what search engine(s) do you recommend?
The question's already drawn several responses. Khopesh (Slashdot reader #112,447) points out that ironically "Doing a Google search for "google alternatives" comes up with a pretty decent list, including DuckDuckGo (powered mostly by Bing) and Brave Search (powered by its own crawler), which are both privacy-first items that do not customize queries to the individual.

Also consider Startpage (powered by anonymized Google queries, see their Wikipedia article).
Other readers shared their own complaints. "Even if no one has a good alternative can someone tell me why pretty much all internet search has become crapified?" asks Slashdot reader Iamthecheese.

My biggest gripe is how Google's search results are technically all referrer URLs -- so if you right-click to copy the link, it's never what you expect. (And that when I search for something that sounds like a product, several rows of the top results are always ads.)

Anyone else? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

And what's best alternative to Google's search results?

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: 10 people were killed in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York this afternoon — and three more were injured — by a gunman who livestreamed the massacre on Twitch. "A Twitch spokesperson said the platform has investigated and confirmed that the stream was removed 'less than two minutes after the violence started,'" reports NBC News.

The Raw Story reports that the 18-year-old suspected gunman had also apparently posted a 106-page manifesto online prior to the attack. A researcher at George Washington University program on extremism studied the manifesto, and points out that the suspected shooter "states that he was radicalized online on 4chan and was inspired by Brenton Tarrant's manifesto and livestreamed mass shooting in New Zealand."

The suspect reportedly used an assault rifle.
Less than two weeks ago, Slashdot posted the following:

28-year-old Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people in New Zealand in 2019. The Associated Press reports that at that point he'd been reading 4chan for 14 years, according to his mother — since the age of 14.

The year before, 25-year-old Alek Minassian, who killed 11 people in Toronto in 2018, namechecked 4chan in a pre-attack Facebook post.

But the Guardian now adds another a story from nine days ago — when a 23-year-old shooter with 1,000 rounds of ammunition opened fire from his apartment in Washington D.C. "Just two minutes after the shooting began, someone under the username "Raymond Spencer" logged onto the normally-anonymous 4chan and started a new thread titled 'shool [sic] shooting'. The newly published message contained a link — to a 30-second video of images captured from the digital scope of Spencer's rifle...."
NBC News reported that while Saturday's suspected shooter was livestreaming, "Some users of the website 4chan discussed the attack, and at least one archived the video in real-time, releasing photos of dead civilians inside the supermarket over the course of Saturday afternoon."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: It's not every day that someone comes across a new state of matter in quantum physics, the scientific field devoted to describing the behavior of atomic and subatomic particles in order to elucidate their properties. Yet this is exactly what an international team of researchers that includes Andrea Bianchi, University of Montreal physics professor and researcher at the Regroupement quebecois sur les materiaux de pointe, and his students Avner Fitterman and Jeremi Dudemaine has done. In a recent article published in the scientific journalPhysical Review X, the researchers document a "quantum spin liquid ground state" in a magnetic material created in Bianchi's lab: Ce2Zr2O7, a compound composed of cerium, zirconium and oxygen. In quantum physics, spin is an internal property of electrons linked to their rotation. It is spin that gives the material in a magnet its magnetic properties.
[...]
Ce2Zr2O7 is a cerium-based material with magnetic properties. "The existence of this compound was known," said Bianchi. "Our breakthrough was creating it in a uniquely pure form. We used samples melted in an optical furnace to produce a near-perfect triangular arrangement of atoms and then checked the quantum state." It was this near-perfect triangle that enabled Bianchi and his team at UdeM to create magnetic frustration in Ce2Zr2O7. Working with researchers at McMaster and Colorado State universities, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex System in Dresden, Germany, they measured the compound's magnetic diffusion. "Our measurements showed an overlapping particle function -- therefore no Bragg peaks -- a clear sign of the absence of classical magnetic order," said Bianchi. "We also observed a distribution of spins with continuously fluctuating directions, which is characteristic of spin liquids and magnetic frustration. This indicates that the material we created behaves like a true spin liquid at low temperatures." After corroborating these observations with computer simulations, the team concluded that they were indeed witnessing a never-before-seen quantum state.

Doctor Who's newest incarnation has been announced. Replacing Jodie Whittaker — and becoming the 14th Doctor Who — is 29-year-old Netflix star Ncuti Gatwa. (In 2020 the Scottish branch of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awarded him the prestigious "Best Actor in Television" award for work on the Netflix series Sex Education.) Fun fact: he also voiced the lead driver in Electronic Arts' racing videogame Grid Legends, according to Wikipedia.

In a BBC press release, he described himself as "a mix of deeply honoured, beyond excited and of course a little bit scared" to take over the long-running part of the TARDIS-traveling Time Lord, according to CNN.

"This role and show means so much to so many around the world, including myself, and each one of my incredibly talented predecessors has handled that unique responsibility and privilege with the utmost care. I will endeavour my utmost to do the same." "Doctor Who" showrunner Russell T Davies said in the press release: "Sometimes talent walks through the door and it's so bright and bold and brilliant, I just stand back in awe and thank my lucky stars.

"Ncuti dazzled us, seized hold of the Doctor and owned those TARDIS keys in seconds."

Gatwa joins the long-running sci-fi series — which follows an alien Time Lord who travels across space and time — ahead of its 60th anniversary in 2023.

Microsoft has officially announced a new "moving platform" feature for the HoloLens 2, which is designed to let the augmented reality headset work in places like cars. The Verge reports: It addresses a long-standing HoloLens issue of moving environments confusing the headset's sensors. The enhancement was developed in collaboration with Volkswagen, which has been experimenting with using the headset as a heads-up display in its vehicles. As Microsoft's blog post explains, its augmented reality headset tracks movement using a combination of camera sensors and an inertial measurement unit (which typically includes accelerometers and gyroscopes). But in a car, the readings from these two sensors can conflict; the headset senses movement but sees a static environment. In other words, it was getting car sick.

That's what VW discovered after it started investigating the use of augmented reality headsets to teach drivers how to get around a racetrack faster. It started collaborating with Microsoft to fix the sensor problem in 2018, and, eventually, the two developed a prototype system that allowed a car to display real-time information on a connected headset. The system allows virtual objects to be placed both inside and outside of the vehicle. One image released by Microsoft (above) shows the HoloLens 2 projecting a virtual map onto the dashboard of a car, with navigation arrows appearing ahead at key intersections. A second shows it alerting the driver to an upcoming pedestrian crossing.

28-year-old Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people in New Zealand in 2019. The Associated Press reports that at that point he'd been reading 4chan for 14 years, according to his mother — since the age of 14.

The year before, 25-year-old Alek Minassian, who killed 11 people in Toronto in 2018, namechecked 4chan in a pre-attack Facebook post.

But the Guardian now adds another a story from nine days ago — when a 23-year-old shooter with 1,000 rounds of ammunition opened fire from his apartment in Washington D.C. Just two minutes after the shooting began, someone under the username "Raymond Spencer" logged onto the normally-anonymous 4chan and started a new thread titled "shool [sic] shooting". The newly published message contained a link — to a 30-second video of images captured from the digital scope of Spencer's rifle....

Even as police stormed the apartment building where Spencer hid, with officers maneuvering past a surveillance camera that he had set up in the hallway and was monitoring, Spencer continued to post to the message board. "They're in the wrong part of the building right now searching," he posted at one point. A few minutes later: "Waiting for police to catch up with me."

As he waited, Spencer logged on to Wikipedia to edit the entry for Edmund Burke School, which he had just opened fire on....

Police believe Spencer shot himself to death as officers breached his apartment.