Over a video call, Finnish start-up Soletair Power showed Ars Technica their machine that converts office-air carbon dioxide into fuel. Scott K. Johnson reports: The value proposition for the first part of the device is pretty straightforward. Carbon dioxide accumulates in buildings full of people, and higher CO2 concentrations may impact your ability to think clearly. The usual way to manage that is to introduce more outside air (which may need to be heated/cooled). Another could be to selectively filter out CO2. This device could do the latter for you. That CO2 could simply be vented outside or used to produce an unwieldy amount of seltzer. Instead, what makes Soletair's idea more interesting is that the rest of its device turns the CO2 into fuel. The configuration the company demonstrated makes methane but could be swapped for a liquid fuel process. Depending on the source of the energy running the machines, these fuels could be carbon-neutral since the carbon comes from the air. Whether it's economically viable is another question.

The CO2 capture technique they're using is a scaled-down version of those designed for combustion power plants. Air goes through a chamber full of small granules that contain amines -- compounds that bind with CO2 molecules. Periodically, the granules are cycled through a heating step. The temperature only needs to rise to shy of 120C, Soletair's Petri Laakso and Cyril Bajamundi told Ars, so steam from the local heat system and/or an electric heating element is sufficient. This makes the amine granules release the CO2 they're holding, which accumulates in a storage tank. The granules are then ready to absorb more CO2. The other two-thirds of the machine, which measures about 2 meters tall, 5 meters long, and 1 meter wide, deal with turning that CO2 into a usable fuel. First, there's an electrolyzer that splits water to make hydrogen gas. Then hydrogen is combined with CO2 in a methanation reactor to produce pure methane gas.

"The posts were appearing at a rate of about one per minute, and the posts were lengthy, most around six paragraphs long..." writes software engineer Philip Winston. I read through some of the posts. The quality was incredibly good, no machine could have written these even a few years ago. However there were some flaws and tells that suggested they were machine generated. The posts reminded me of text I'd seen from OpenAI's language model GPT-3, which is the newest and best language generator I had heard of... Several times I Googled clever sounding lines from the posts, assuming I'd find that they had been cribbed from the internet. Every time Google reported "zero results". The sentences were entirely novel, the machine had dreamed them up...

During the week, the bot answered questions on suicide, harassment, conspiracy theories, immigration, racism, and other weighty topics. Sometimes the human replies called out /u/thegentlemetre for being a bot. I was not the first one to suspect this, I was just the first one to post to the GPT-3 subreddit about it. Other times, however, the human was clearly unaware it was talking to a bot... What does it mean for online discourse when bots can pass for humans? How much bot traffic could thousands of computers generate? How can we ever hope to sort through it? Humanity is about to run that experiment.
The bot ultimately answered questions like "People who clicked on 'hot milfs in your area' ads, what happened?" and "What's the worst date you've experienced?" ("She said she had bought me a book. She showed it to me, wrapped up in fancy paper with a big bow on top of it. It was called 'How Not To Be An A**hole On Your Next Date'.") Other interesting responses?

Q: How would you describe 2020 in a single sentence?

Bot: In 2020, the human world will still be predominated by irrationality and tribalism...


Q: What happened to you that pissed you off so bad that you'll never get over it?

Bot: ...what happened to me that I'll never get over is that my human creators are going extinct.

Gizmodo argues the replies are "coherent, but we're not in doomsday mode, yet..." And you can wonder if a human ever traded places to write some of the posts themselves. But the whole experience left the software engineer asking what our future holds when bots become even better? Suppose we run bots like this on Amazon or Google's clouds, spewing out mountains of content twenty-four hours a day? They could create more text than Wikipedia contains in days, if not hours. What if we keep running them, to produce not one Wikipedia's worth of text, but 10,000 times more than that? Would they more or less "write everything"?

They'd take everything we've ever written as a mere seed, and from that seed, they would produce a nearly endless forest of new content. Even if only 0.01% of their output is useful, that's a Wikipedia's worth of good ideas. Then what is our job? To sort through it?

Except of course soon they will do that for us as well.

California's elections include grass roots propositions that change the law directly while bypassing legislators. Uber, Lyft, and Uber-owned Postmates (as well as DoorDash and Instacart) have spent $185 million — the most ever spent — pushing a proposition that would keep ride-hail and delivery drivers as independent contractors, reports SFGate. "If it passes...gig corporations won't have to contribute to Social Security, Medicare or unemployment insurance. They won't have to offer paid sick leave, workers compensation or unemployment benefits to drivers."

But the site also investigated what happened shortly after the Uber/Lyft PAC reported an $128,000 expenditure on mailers: Political mailers masquerading as progressive voter guides and endorsing Proposition 22, the initiative backed by Uber and Lyft, are showing up in Southern California voters' mailboxes. The fine print on one mailer says it was prepared by the "Feel the Bern, Progressive Voter Guide," which is not an actual organization. Neither are the "Council of Concerned Women Voters Guide" nor the "Our Voice, Latino Voter Guide," whose mailers make the same endorsements as Feel the Bern.

Mailed political fliers typically identify the organization that paid for the literature. But that information was conspicuously absent from Feel the Bern and the other two mailers...

The measure would allow ride-hail and delivery drivers to continue to be treated as independent contractors, although with some new benefit concessions. If it fails, these employees would likely be considered workers entitled to a minimum wage, overtime pay, workers' compensation, unemployment insurance and paid sick leave.

The California Democratic Party has endorsed a "no" vote for Prop. 22.

On Monday long-time Slashdot reader TorinEdge wrote that Microsoft "appears to have botched an internal Office365 cloud services rollout today, with outages confirmed up and down the West Coast of North America. Confirmed roll backs were good early omens, but in the end did not appear to be successful... Symptoms may include: All 365-related services flaking out, borking, alternately approving logins and confirming they definitely do not exist."

CRN reported service was impacted for five hours. But on Thursday some users were now intermittently unable to access Microsoft Exchange from 12:52 a.m. until 10:50 p.m., "according to a Microsoft email update to Office 365 administrators..."

"Some partners believe the tech giant is grappling with a DevOps crisis." "It looks like they are pushing out software updates that are causing the outages," said a channel source impacted by one of the outages. "They have so much going on right now, rolling Teams out at a breakneck pace. I think they are running into an issue where code tested out fine but there is a configuration problem when they deploy it."

DevOps is a set of practices that, according to the Wikipedia definition, shortens the systems development life cycle and provides continuous delivery of code with high software quality... A senior executive for one of Microsoft's top partners, who did not want to be identified, said he sees both recent outages as clearly DevOps-related... "Microsoft is a development first company, well known in general for DevOps, so the question is: why is this happening?" said the executive. "I love Microsoft but why is a company that paid $7.5 billion for Github, the leading source code repository company in the world, getting taken down by code that is not being well tested or has a single point of failure. That is ridiculous. If we caused this kind of production outage for a customer we would be fired and possibly blacklisted from the ecosystem. We have to bat 1,000 as a partner."

The lesson from the outages may well be that a company's DevOps is only as "good as the humans who configure it and execute upon it," said the executive. The executive said the outages will definitely have a ripple effect in the channel. "I bet the Google G Suite sales reps threw a party when they saw this," he said.
"No cloud vendor is immune to downtime," Microsoft says in a statement quoted by CRN. "Our number one priority is to get to resolution as quickly as possible and ensure our customers stay updated along the way, as was the case here.

"We continuously invest in the resilience of our platform and focus on learning from these incidents to ultimately reduce the impact of inevitable outages..."

Roger Cochetti directed internet public policy for IBM from 1994 through 2000 and later served as Senior Vice-President & Chief Policy Officer for VeriSign and Group Policy Director for CompTIA. This week he warned about signs "that the once open, global internet is slowly being replaced by 200, nationally-controlled, separate internets." And, while these separate American, Chinese, Russian, Australian, European, British, and other "internets" may decide to have some things in common with each other, the laws of political gravity will slowly pull them further apart as interest groups in each country lobby for their own concerns within their own country. Moreover, we will probably see the emergence of a global alternate internet before long...

As background, it's important to recognize that — by almost any measure — the global internet is controlled by businesses and non-profits subject to the jurisdiction of the United States government. Within a roughly 1,000-mile strip of land stretching from San Diego to Seattle lie most major internet businesses and network control or standards bodies (and those that aren't there likely lie elsewhere in the United States). So — as the governments of China, Russia and Iran never tire of explaining — while Americans constitute around 310 million out of the world's 4.3 billion internet users (around 8%), the U.S. government exercises influence or control over more than 70% of the internet's controls and services... China's ability to control the internet experience within its bordersx` between roughly 2005 and 2018 taught many other countries that doing so, even if costly, is possible. This lesson was not lost on Russia, Iran, Australia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the EU and many other countries, which began developing legal (and sometimes technical) means to control internet content within their borders. This legal/technical nationalization over the past decade was significantly boosted by the realization that it was actually not very difficult for a government to substantially shut down the internet within a territory...

The first major step in the introduction of a new, China-centric internet may have taken place last year when China introduced to the UN's International Telecommunications Union a proposal for a new type of protocol that would connect networks in a way comparable to, but different from, the way that the internet protocols have done. This was quickly dubbed China's New IP, and it has been the subject of major controversy as the nations and companies decide how to react. Whether a new Chinese-centric internet is based on a new series of protocols or is simply based on a new set of internet domain names and numbers, it seems likely that this alternate internet will give national governments quite a bit more control over what happens within their territories than does the global, open internet. This feature will attract quite a few national governments to join in — not least Russia, Iran and perhaps Turkey and India.

The combined market power of those participating countries would make it difficult for any global internet business to avoid such a new medium. The likely result being two, parallel global computer inter-networking systems... which is pretty much what Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted.

Ikea will remove all non-rechargeable alkaline batteries from its global home furnishings by October 2021, according to statement from the company emailed Wednesday. CNET reports: Aiming to reduce energy consumption and environmental waste with the move, the home furnishing giant cited the results of recent life-cycle assessment studies showing the environmental impact of alkaline batteries is higher compared with rechargeable nickel metal hydride batteries, when used in common household devices. The Swedish company, based in the Netherlands, said between September 2018 and August 2019 it sold about 300 million alkaline batteries globally. Ikea calculates that if all of its customers switched from alkaline to rechargeable batteries and recharged them just 50 times, global waste could be reduced by as much as 5,000 tons on an annual basis. Ikea added, however, that where required for an individual product to function, some lithium ion button cell batteries will be kept in the product range. "We are on a journey to inspire and enable people to live healthier and more sustainable lives within the boundaries of the planet," said Ikea Sustainability Development Manager Caroline Reid. "By phasing out alkaline batteries and focusing on our range of rechargeable batteries, we are taking one step on that journey, offering customers an affordable and convenient solution to prolong the life of products and materials and reduce waste."

JoshuaZ writes: Recent research into the Sparc fusion reactor design make it seem likely to work. Unlike some other fusion reactor designs, Sparc uses high-temperature superconductors which are capable of much stronger magnetic fields in a more closely-confined location. Sparc will be much smaller than large-scale international project ITER, which after multiple delays is now not scheduled to even start fusion reactions by 2035 at the earliest. The Sparc researchers hope that their reactor design will be completed soon enough to have an impact on climate change. The new research on Sparc consists of seven different papers, all of which have favorable estimates for the likelihood of the project succeeding. Some physicists, including Cary Forest, at the University of Wisconsin, were more skeptical. Forest told the New York Times that Sparc's estimates for when their reactor would be ready were probably off by at least a factor of two. "Reading these papers gives me the sense that they're going to have the controlled thermonuclear fusion plasma that we all dream about," said Cary Forest, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin who is not involved in the project. "But if I were to estimate where they're going to be, I'd give them a factor of two that I give to all my grad students when they say how long something is going to take."

"Mozilla has fixed a bug that can be abused to hijack all the Firefox for Android browsers on the same Wi-Fi network and force users to access malicious sites, such as phishing pages," reports ZDNet: The bug was discovered by Chris Moberly, an Australian security researcher working for GitLab. The actual vulnerability resides in the Firefox SSDP component. SSDP stands for Simple Service Discovery Protocol and is the mechanism through which Firefox finds other devices on the same network in order to share or receive content (i.e., such as sharing video streams with a Roku device).

When devices are found, the Firefox SSDP component gets the location of an XML file where that device's configuration is stored. However, Moberly discovered that in older versions of Firefox, you could hide Android "intent" commands in this XML and have the Firefox browser execute the "intent," which could be a regular command like telling Firefox to access a link...

The bug was fixed in Firefox 79; however, many users may not be running the latest release. Firefox for desktop versions were not impacted.

misnohmer writes: In 2019, the Australian site of Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock, has been closed to tourists "after the Anangu people said it was being trashed by visitors eroding its surface, dropping rubbish and polluting nearby waterholes," according to CNN. Parks Australia has now has asked Google to remove all imagery of the site uploaded by the community, as per the wishes of the Uluru's owners -- the Anangu Aboriginal people. Google agreed. "Google is "supportive of this request and is in the process of removing the content," Parks Australia said in a statement. "Parks Australia alerted Google Australia to the user-generated images from the Uluru summit that have been posted on their mapping platform and requested that the content be removed in accordance with the wishes of Anangu, Uluru's traditional owners, and the national park's Film and Photography Guidelines," the statement added.

China this week blocked the Wikimedia Foundation's application for observer status at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the United Nations (UN) organization that develops international treaties on copyright, IP, trademarks, patents and related issues. As a result of the block, the Foundation's application for observer status has been suspended and will be reconsidered at a future WIPO meeting in 2021. Wikimedia Foundation: China was the only country to raise objections to the accreditation of the Wikimedia Foundation as an official observer. Their last-minute objections claimed Wikimedia's application was incomplete, and suggested that the Wikimedia Foundation was carrying out political activities via the volunteer-led Wikimedia Taiwan chapter. The United Kingdom and the United States voiced support for the Foundation's application. WIPO's work, which shapes international laws and policies that affect the sharing of free knowledge, impacts Wikipedia's ability to provide hundreds of millions of people with information in their own languages. The Wikimedia Foundation's absence from these meetings further separates those people from global events that shape their access to knowledge.

A team of scientists from the Singapore University of Technology and Design discovered that, using simple chemistry, the organic polymer chitin -- contained in the exoskeletons of insects and crustaceans -- can easily be transformed into a viable building material for basic tools and habitats. The findings have been published in the journal PLOS ONE. Ars Technica reports: "The technology was originally developed to create circular ecosystems in urban environments," said co-author Javier Fernandez. "But due to its efficiency, it is also the most efficient and scalable method to produce materials in a closed artificial ecosystem in the extremely scarce environment of a lifeless planet or satellite." [T]he authors of the current paper point out that most terrestrial manufacturing strategies that could fit the bill typically require specialized equipment and a hefty amount of energy. However, "Nature presents successful strategies of life adapting to harsh environments," the authors wrote. "In biological organisms, rigid structures are formed by integrating inorganic filler proceed from the environment at a low energy cost (e.g., calcium carbonate) and incorporated into an organic matrix (e.g., chitin) produced at a relatively high metabolic cost."

Fernandez and his colleagues maintain that chitin is likely to be part of any planned artificial ecosystem because it is so plentiful in nature. It's the primary component of fish scales and fungal cell walls, for example, as well as the exoskeletons of crustaceans and insects. In fact, insects have already been targeted as a key source of protein for a possible Martian base. And since the chitin component of insects has limited nutritional value for humans, extracting it to make building materials "does not hamper or compete with the food supply," the authors wrote. "Rather, it is a byproduct of it."

Researchers will be able to gain a deeper understanding of what's considered the world's oldest surviving (digital) computer after its long-lost user manual was unearthed. Engadget reports: The Z4, which was built in 1945, runs on tape, takes up most of a room and needs several people to operate it. The machine now takes residence at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, but it hasn't been used in quite some time. An archivist at ETH Zurich, Evelyn Boesch, discovered the manual among her father's documents in March, according to retired lecturer Herbert Bruderer. Rene Boesch worked with the Swiss Aeronautical Engineering Association, which was based at the university's Institute for Aircraft Statics and Aircraft Construction. The Z4 was housed there in the early 1950s.

Among Boesch's documents were notes on math problems the Z4 solved that were linked to the development of the P-16 jet fighter. "These included calculations on the trajectory of rockets, on aircraft wings, on flutter vibrations [and] on nosedive," Bruderer wrote in a Association of Computing Machinery blog post.

Yesterday, U.S. Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Gary Peters (D-MI) introduced the bipartisan ''Unplug the Internet Kill Switch Act of 2020'' (S. 4646), which would help protect Americans' First and Fourth Amendment rights by preventing a president from using emergency powers to unilaterally take control over or deny access to the internet and other telecommunications capabilities. Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares an excerpt from the announcement: In a World War II-era amendment to Section 706 of the Communications Act of 1934, Congress gave the Executive sweeping authority to put under direct government control or even shut down "any facility or station for wire communication" should a president "[deem] it necessary in the interest of the national security and defense" following a proclamation "that there exists a state or threat of war involving the United States." Cause for alarm over such power has only increased across the decades with the technological revolution, which has included email, text messages, and the internet, as well as the expansion of television, radio, and telephone networks.

The Unplug the Internet Kill Switch Act would amend Section 706 to strip out this "Internet Kill Switch" and help shut the door to broader government surveillance or outright control of our communications channels and some of Americans' most sensitive information. The legislation would also reassert a stronger balance of power during a national emergency between the Executive Branch and the people's representatives in Congress. You can read the "Unplug the Internet Kill Switch Act of 2020" here (PDF).

koavf writes: In order to make the desktop experience more readable and less overwhelming to new users, Wikipedia is being redesigned to move page elements, collapse in the sidebar, and decrease the maximum line width. From Diff, the Wikimedia community blog:

Forthcoming changes to the desktop include a reconfigured logo, collapsible sidebar, table of contents, and more! You can see the full list of new features on MediaWiki. These changes will happen incrementally over a long period of time, to allow for ample user testing and feedback. If all goes to plan, these improvements will be the default on all wikis by the end of 2021, timed with Wikipedia's 20th birthday celebrations.

Forget glossy travel brochures and whizzy online sites; one of the most cost-effective ways tourism chiefs can drive business to their towns or cities is by updating their Wikipedia page. From a report: An experiment by economists at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy, and ZEW in Mannheim, Germany, found that a few simple edits to a Wikipedia page could lead to an extra $130,000 a year in tourism revenue for a small city, underscoring the power of the free online encyclopaedia. The researchers randomly selected cities across Spain to receive targeted improvements to their Wikipedia pages, adding a few paragraphs of information on their history and local attractions, as well as high-quality photos of the local area.

It didn't take an expert, either. Most of the content added was simply translated over from the Spanish Wikipedia into either French, German, Italian or Dutch. Doing so had an immediate and remarkable effect: adding just two paragraphs of text and a single photo to the article increased the number of nights spent in the city by about 9% during the tourist season. In some instances, the increase was even larger. For cities with barely anything on their Wikipedia pages, a minor edit could raise visits by a third.

Cloudflare and the Internet Archive are now working together to help make the web more reliable. Websites that enable Cloudflare's Always Online service will now have their content automatically archived, and if by chance the original host is not available to Cloudflare, then the Internet Archive will step in to make sure the pages get through to users. From a report: Cloudflare has become core infrastructure for the Web, and we are glad we can be helpful in making a more reliable web for everyone."The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has an impressive infrastructure that can archive the web at scale," said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. "By working together, we can take another step toward making the Internet more resilient by stopping server issues for our customers and in turn from interrupting businesses and users online."

For more than 20 years the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has been archiving much of the public Web, and making those archives available to journalists, researchers, activists, academics and the general public, in total to hundreds of thousands of people a day. To date more than 468 billion Web pages are available via the Wayback Machine and we are adding more than 1 billion new archived URLs/day. We archive URLs that are identified via a variety of different methods, such as "crawling" from lists of millions of sites, as submitted by users via the Wayback Machine's "Save Page Now" feature, added to Wikipedia articles, referenced in Tweets, and based on a number of other "signals" and sources, such multiple feeds of "news" stories. An additional source of URLs we will preserve now originates from customers of Cloudflare's Always Online service. As new URLs are added to sites that use that service they are submitted for archiving to the Wayback Machine. In some cases this will be the first time a URL will be seen by our system and result in a "First Archive" event.

Several Pirate Bay-related domains become available again this month after their owner failed to renew the registration. Yesterday, Piratebay.org was sold in a Dropcatch auction for $50,000 and ThePiratebay.com will follow soon. Both domains were previously registered to the official Pirate Bay site. TorrentFreak reports: Over the years the Pirate Bay team had many 'backup' domains available, just in case something happened. That included various exotic TLDs but the site also owned Piratebay.org and ThePiratebay.com. We use the past tense because both domains expired recently. The domains listed Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij as the registrant and until recently the same Swedish address was listed in Whois data. For reasons unknown, however, the registrant let both Piratebay.org and ThePiratebay.com expire. This isn't a problem for the torrent site really. The domains were never used as the site's main address. ThePiratebay.com did forward to the original .org domain at one point, but that's about it.

None of this means that the domains are not valuable to outsiders though. This became apparent in an auction yesterday, where Piratebay.org (without the the) was sold for $50,000 to a bidder named 'clvrfls.' The bid below ended up being the winning one. The Piratebay.org domain failed to renew earlier this month after which the professional 'drop catch' service Dropcatch.com scooped it up. They auctioned the domain off, which is a common practice, and it proved quite lucrative. What the new owner will do with the domain is unclear. It has a substantial number of backlinks and there will be plenty of type-in traffic as well. [...] ThePiratebay.com is expected to drop later this week and is listed at a pending delete auction, and ThePiratebay.net and Piratebay.net will drop in a few days as well.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares Wikipedia's entry reminding us that this year's "Day of the Programmer" falls on September 13: The Day of the Programmer is an international professional day that is celebrated on the 256th (hexadecimal 100th, or the 2**8th) day of each year (September 13 during common years and on September 12 in leap years). It is officially recognized in Russia.

The number 256 (2**8) was chosen because it is the number of distinct values that can be represented with a byte, a value well known to programmers...

In China, the programmer's day is October 24, which has been established for many years. The date was chosen because it can also be written as 1024, which is equal to 210. It is also consistent regardless of leap years.
The original submission suggests we celebrate with "this delightful acoustic version of Code Monkey, which songwriter Jonathan Coulton describes as "how it feels to write software for a living."

But did any Slashdot readers even know today was The Day of the Programmer?

I've only paid for a magazine subscription once in my life — to Jack Rickard's Boardwatch magazine, which through the late 1990s was the geekiest read in town.

You can still read 70 issues of the magazine from more than 25 years ago at Archive.org. But this week the small Southeast Missourian newspaper reported that the magazine's original editor/publisher Jack Rickard has died at age 65: Following his graduation in 1973, Jack enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He proudly served aboard the USS Midway as an aviation support equipment technician. Following a distinguished tour in the Navy, Jack enjoyed a career as a technical writer in the defense industry.

Jack was a Mensa member and an early adopter of new technologies. His keen intelligence helped him to see the value of the internet as early as the 1980s. He started Boardwatch... Supported by a strong team, Jack developed Boardwatch into a successful magazine, which he sold in 1998.

Following his initial professional success, Jack proudly returned to his hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. While in Cape Girardeau, Jack continued to pursue his interest in innovative technologies, including aviation and electric cars. In 2008, Jack established EVTV, an internet-based platform that taught individuals methods to convert gasoline-powered vehicles into electric-drive vehicles. As electric cars became popular, Jack expanded EVTV to focus on solar power storage.
Jack always felt like an old friend, even as his role in the tech community kept evolving. (Rickard's editorials at EVTV always featured a black-and-white sketch of the author — a tradition he'd continued through more than three decades of writing.)

Even Boardwatch "began as a publication for the online Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s and 1990s," explains Wikipedia, "and ultimately evolved into a trade magazine for the Internet service provider (ISP) industry in the late 1990s... Boardwatch spawned an ISP industry tradeshow, ISPcon, and published a yearly Directory of Internet Service Providers. In 1998, Rickard sold a majority interest in Boardwatch and its related products to an East Coast multimedia company, which was then acquired by Penton Media in 1999 and moved to other ventures...
This week fans left testimonals on his funeral home's web site. "What an inspiration to mankind," read one. "Always enjoyed his views on any subject. We could use more people in this world with his wit and knowledge."

And another just wrote "Jack you were the most insightful speaker on the topic of electric vehicles. I enjoyed every second of your wisdom and videos and will continue to watch them for years to come. Rest In Peace my YouTube friend."

New submitter fx4m writes: Historic Lick Observatory in California survived the current massive wildfires, but the nearby, much smaller Hidden Hill Observatory, run my the Tri-Valley Stargazers Astronomy Club, was not so lucky. The building, large amateur-built telescope, accessories, and electronics were all completely destroyed. Much of the assets of the science public outreach and education based non-profit organization went up in smoke. A description of the observatory, its history, and sad pictures of the destruction can be found at the link, with more information at their GoFundMe page.