Slashdot reader sandbagger brings news about the classic science ficdtion magazine Starlog. It's 33-year run from 1976 to 2009 is now available on the Internet Archive.

And 17 years after publishing its final issue, Starlog is relaunching, publishing one issue a year starting November 13, according to The Hollywood Reporter: The magazine launched in 1976 and gained a fanbase for being one of the few places to get reliable news and interviews about geek culture. It launched with a cover focusing on Star Trek, one of its key areas of expertise, but the magazine's editors and writers also pioneered coverage of Star Wars. (The new issue chronicles some of the rumors it put out a year before the movie opened). In all, Starlog published 374 issues and more than 25,000 pages... In addition to the film and TV-focused features Starlog was known for, the new Starlog will also delve into futurism, as the cover from Gabriel Yeganyan highlights. The opening story of issue No. 1 looks at the viability of humans farming crops on planets outside of Earth, for example... The revival was announced earlier this year, and includes a podcast hosted by Jordan Hoffman, a veteran journalist who has contributed to The Hollywood Reporter.

Rather than racing toward their net-zero targets, Amazon and other AI/cloud computing companies "are driving emissions sharply higher," reports the Washington Post: To support their data centers, tech firms are driving construction of a new generation of supersized, gas-fired power plants that could lock in hundreds of millions of tons of climate pollution for decades to come, according to corporate disclosures and an analysis conducted for The Post by a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Industry estimates show these projects have put the tech sector on course to grow from a modest driver of industrial carbon pollution into one of the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. Some anticipate that its share of global carbon emissions will increase as much as fivefold from 2020 to 2030. That would leave the tech industry churning out more than half the climate pollution created by global aviation or shipping — sectors long associated with driving warming...

Already, Amazon's carbon footprint reached 80.85 million metric tons last year — 58% larger than when [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos pledged to shrink it. The company has veered far from the path laid out in the Paris agreement, which would have emissions falling steeply by now and dropping to 43% below 2019 levels by 2030. The tech companies say in corporate disclosures and public statements that they remain committed to their net zero targets, and they suggest the emissions surge is temporary — to be mitigated down the road, when new energy technologies enable the data centers to run cleaner and more efficiently. They also stress that they continue to invest in clean energy and rank as some of the world's biggest consumers of it. With some complicated accounting maneuvers and carbon credit purchases, their solar, wind and geothermal installations partly cancel out their gas emissions, according to corporate disclosures.
A June report from international insurance/asset management Allianz found the world's data center emissions are on track to double to 643 million tons of CO2 annually between 2020 and 2030, the article points out. And they cite American data centers contributing to the problem:

• Just two gas projects Amazon signed on to for data centers planned in Texas and Pennsylvania "would produce more carbon pollution than the dirtiest facility in the country," an Alabama coal plant powering 1 million homes.

• Meta is building a nearly six-square-mile campus in Louisiana "that will consume as much electricity as three cities the size of New Orleans."

• "A sprawling Microsoft project in West Texas involving a giant gas plant built by Chevron and a Google project in Wyoming that would consume five times as much electricity as every household in that state would vastly expand the emissions associated with those companies."

• "A data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, that will support OpenAI's artificial intelligence operations will consume significantly more gas power, and, therefore, emit more carbon pollution, than the Microsoft and Google projects combined."

Despite the Trump administration's efforts to halt development on a $6.2 billion wind farm, it's now "completely up and running," reports the nonprofit energy news site Canary Media, delivering enough electricity to power the equivalent over 350,000 homes: On Thursday, the Danish energy giant Ørsted said its 704-megawatt wind farm near Connecticut and Rhode Island began "generating up to its full capacity" in October. Revolution Wind began producing smaller amounts of power in the spring, and the company installed the last of 65 turbines in September. The project is the third U.S. utility-scale offshore wind farm to reach full commercial operations, after South Fork Wind near New York and Vineyard Wind near Massachusetts.
Before the start of Trump's second term, BloombergNEF projected America would build 39 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035 the article points out, but "Now, it expects just 5.9 GW to come online — an amount that reflects the handful of projects that were already completed or under construction at the start of last year." Despite the diminished pipeline, the carbon-free energy source is still expected to help keep household utility bills in check across the U.S. Northeast, experts say. Revolution Wind and the country's other completed projects have already played a key role in reducing grid stress during extreme weather events this year...

Ørsted hit its power milestone despite being forced to halt construction twice last year. In August 2025, the Interior Department issued a stop-work order for Revolution Wind, due to unspecified national security threats. That order was tossed out by a federal judge one month later. But in late December, the administration issued new stop-work orders to all five offshore wind projects then under construction. Judges struck those orders down one by one — but not before developers had lost huge sums of money and nearly missed key project deadlines...

Meanwhile, Ørsted said it's making progress on another offshore wind development, Sunrise Wind. The developer on Thursday said it has finished installing all of the wind-turbine foundations for the 924-MW project off the coast of Long Island, New York. That installation is expected to be fully operational in the second half of next year.

"AlmaLinux OS charted a new path in 2023 when Red Hat restricted source code access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux," remembers Linux Magazine. "Rather than pursue 1:1 compatibility with RHEL like other Enterprise Linux alternatives, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation chose application binary interface (ABI) compatibility, which guarantees that applications and kernel modules that work on RHEL will work on AlmaLinux OS." No longer constrained by the 1:1 promise, AlmaLinux can offer new features, or add back deprecated ones, while still remaining a stable, drop-in replacement for RHEL... The release of AlmaLinux OS 10.2 in May 2026 reveals just how far AlmaLinux has come....

When RHEL 10 increased the x86-64-v2 architecture baseline to x86-64-v3, many older server platforms (and some new ones) were left in the lurch. These older servers couldn't support the modern CPU feature sets in x86-64-v3, including AVX2 CPU instructions. AlmaLinux recognized that many community members employed older hardware that relied on x86-64-v2. While x86-64-v3 is enabled by default in AlmaLinux OS 10 and AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10, an additional x86-64-v2 build is also available. The x86-64-v2 build works best for environments that rely on standard OS packages or that can rebuild any additional packages required by x86-64-v2. For users with older hardware, the additional x86-64-v2 build allows continued use of current hardware, saving money and keeping servers from the landfill. AlmaLinux OS 10 is actively supported through 2030 with security support through 2035, significantly extending the life of older hardware....

Many legacy applications and containerized workloads still run on i686, a 32-bit computer processor architecture belonging to the Intel x86 family, including software that only ships as i686, CI pipelines that require a specific 32-bit glibc, and seemingly normal looking containers that require a 32-bit environment. RHEL 10 completely removed 32-bit application support and multilib libraries after deprecating support in earlier releases... AlmaLinux OS 10.2 has added package repos and official container images for 32-bit x86 (but not a 32-bit kernel or installer)...

NVIDIA GPUs, ubiquitous in modern computing, have been a pain point for Linux users. Getting the closed-source NVIDIA drivers has required extra steps and manual installation. When NVIDIA released an open source version of their graphics driver, AlmaLinux integrated the drivers, along with the associated CUDA components, into the AlmaLinux repository starting with AlmaLinux OS 9 and 10. AlmaLinux also signs the open source drivers, allowing secure boot with the NVIDIA drivers they ship. Unlike RHEL users, AlmaLinux users now have native support, allowing them to skip manual installation. AlmaLinux users can now enjoy a fully integrated NVIDIA experience.
In addition, "Thanks to ABI compatibility, AlmaLinux can sometimes deliver patches more quickly than RHEL," the article points out. And it lists other points where AlmaLinux OS 10.2 diverges from RHEL 10:

• Re-enabling frame pointers disabled by default in RHEL and CentOS Stream to provide system-wide, real-time tracing and profiling to diagnose and optimize code.
• Enabling both kernel and userspace components that allow installation of AlmaLinux on a Btrfs filesystem
• Adding SPICE support dropped in RHEL 9, allowing users to interact with a virtual machine's desktop remotely instead of just from the host server.
• Restoring support for older storage and network drivers disabled upstream, including Adaptec, Dell PERC, HP, Mellanox, QLogic, Emulex, LSI, and Broadcom.

A UN-backed report warns that even temporarily overshooting the Paris agreement's 1.5C warming target could cause permanent and widespread losses of glaciers, snow and polar ice sheets. With Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets already melting about six times faster than in the 1990s, the report argues that global temperatures should ultimately be brought back below 1C. The Guardian reports: The report, which comes as world leaders and diplomats converge on Turkey for the 31st annual Cop climate conference, documented rapid and accelerating melting of the cryosphere and polar oceans, with damages that range from the loss of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, driving sea level rises that threaten hundreds of millions of people, to thawing permafrost, which releases more planet-heating gas. Glaciers, which are still responding to historical warming, would only preserve about 70% of their current volume over a timescale of centuries if long-term heating were brought back down to 0.8C, the report found.

Meanwhile, the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, which are melting about six times faster today than in the 1990s, would continue to lose ice even in scenarios where overshoot is brief and temperature rise returns to 1.5C, the report found. The scientists said a safe, long-term temperature limit for polar ice sheets lies much closer to 1.0C of global heating, and possibly even lower. "Snow and ice respond rapidly to every fraction of a degree of warming," said [James Kirkham, a glaciologist at ICCI and the lead author of the report. "But most of these systems will take centuries or millennia to recover after overshoot, especially if tipping points are crossed that cause changes to become essentially irreversible."

Last month, a UNEP report found the world must cut emissions by 18% by 2030 and by 45% by 2035 to have a good chance of keeping temperatures from rising 1.7C above preindustrial levels. It found there were "no good outcomes" of remaining above 1.5C. The cryosphere report found that current policies, which will result in 2.8C of global heating, would reduce the mass of glacier ice to below 10% in the Rockies, Alps, Iceland and Scandinavia. If warming was limited to 1.5C, about 20-35% of the mass would remain. In the Hindu Kush Himalayas, where glaciers are a source of water for nearly a quarter of humanity, current policies will leave just 41% of the ice mass. If warming was limited to 1.5C, 83% would remain.

More than 100 activists breached a Microsoft AI data center construction site in Amsterdam as part of coordinated protests against the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure. "These data centres are destroying our world. It's becoming uninhabitable because of all the resources they consume. That's why we're here today," protester Sam van der Beek said. Reuters reports: Activist groups have announced actions in 16 countries on Friday and Saturday, according to the "Stop Dirty Data Centers" coalition, which is rallying environmental groups and digital rights campaigns behind calls to pause large-scale construction. In Amsterdam on Friday, more than 100 activists gathered at the construction site of a Microsoft AI data centre, marching arm in arm before breaking into the site, climbing cranes, hanging balloons and dancing while police stood by. Some carried placards with messages reading: "Screw your datacenter."

Site owner Pure Data Centers, which plans to invest more than $1 billion and is backed by Brookfield-owned Oaktree, said it was committed to engagement with local stakeholders. "We respectfully ask those on site to leave safely and engage with us in dialogue about the development and any concerns they may have," it said. Other planned actions include a march in Dublin, a protest outside the parliament building in Warsaw, and a demonstration against a different Microsoft data centre in Denmark. [...] Stop Dirty Data Centers says it is not anti-progress or calling for existing data centers to be closed but that major construction should be halted until governments establish clearer rules.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Top Republican lawmakers have asked Jensen Huang to appear before Congress to answer questions after it was reported that US intelligence officials believe Nvidia's chief executive has been targeted by a Chinese spying operation. The chairs of the House committees on China, foreign affairs, and intelligence wrote to Huang this week asking him to appear before a joint closed-door briefing for their committees on November 18. "Recent reports raise significant national security concerns regarding the People's Republic of China's access to sensitive US technology and information," representatives John Moolenaar, Brian Mast, and Rick Crawford wrote. "The issue of PRC infiltration and access to cutting-edge US technology is core to the investigative work of our three committees this Congress. It is vital that Congress determines the extent to which US national security has been placed at risk," the lawmakers added.

The New York Times last week wrote that US intelligence officials believed Huang had been the target of a Chinese spy operation. The concerns center on a Chinese woman named Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud company that has bought billions of dollars of Nvidia's chips. Nvidia has rejected the claims and on Thursday would not say if Huang would appear before Congress. "Meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job. Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year," the company said. "Our regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information -- not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets -- and zero information relevant to national security," it added.

The lawmakers said they wanted Huang to discuss the security protocols Nvidia had in place to protect against "foreign adversary espionage." The company said its chief executive had an "outstanding security team" that travels with him. The New York Times said Huang had not received a "defensive briefing," which the intelligence community usually, but not always, provides potential espionage targets to warn them about the activity. Nvidia said it was confident that the US government would have let the company know if it thought a person was a threat to US industry and that it often receives updates from Washington about people of concern.

Britain plans to require employers to disclose salaries in job advertisements. "Whether you're a young person starting out or a parent trying to support your family, you should know what a job pays before spending your time and effort applying for it," Prime Minister Andy Burnham said in a statement. Reuters reports: The government said requiring companies to disclose pay in job ads would help young people applying for their first jobs, while boosting pay transparency and helping tackle disparities that can disadvantage women. Just over two in five employers always publish salary ranges, while fewer than one in five always disclose specific salaries, Burnham's office said, citing estimates from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

The government will soon introduce legislation to parliament making salary disclosures mandatory, Burnham's office said, although it did not provide a timeline. Nearly one million, or 13%, of 16 to 24 year-olds in Britain are not in employment, education or training, one of the highest shares in Europe. A government review into youth inactivity is due to be published later in November.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area in the Pacific Ocean where debris naturally accumulates, is full of tiny bits of plastic -- so full, in fact, that it seems to be changing the color of the ocean. [...] To better understand how microplastics may have influenced the ocean's color, [Daniel Koestner, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen in Norway] and his colleagues looked at 20 years of satellite data from the spot in the ocean with perhaps the most of plastic -- the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a zone between Hawaii and California where trash trapped by ocean currents accumulates.

Between 2002 and 2022, the researchers found, waters near the garbage patch have gotten brighter in both blue and green wavelengths compared with surrounding areas. The results, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment on Thursday, don't yet prove that microplastics have directly brightened the ocean, the researchers emphasize, though their findings are backed up by lab experiments with microplastics. But without taking direct ocean samples, it's hard to know for sure what's causing the ocean's color to change. "We're still one step away from proving definitively that microplastics are causing the shift in color that that we're seeing," adds study co-author Shea Cheatham, a Ph.D. student also at the University of Bergen. "We just have to get in there [to the garbage patch] to verify."

The hope is that detecting these color shifts could help identify other areas around the world where microplastics have accumulated.

Paraguayan President Santiago Pena resigned Thursday amid mass protests and impeachment threats following the collapse of Ueno Bank, a major digital lender with close ties to his administration and more than 60% of the country's adults as customers. Regulators seized the bank after uncovering risky insider lending and accounting irregularities that left its capital below legal requirements, locking millions of customers out of their savings. The Associated Press reports: Soon after winning its banking license in 2023, Ueno seemed to be everywhere in Paraguay. The digital lender, a rebranded version of a decades-old finance company, lured customers with generous cash-back offers on groceries, grew to more than 70 locations, sponsored Paraguay's national soccer team and plastered its name on the country's main stadium. Government money poured into Ueno's coffers under Pena. He also appointed Carlos Carvallo, president of Financiera Ueno, the predecessor to Ueno Bank, to run the central bank, the agency charged with supervising the digital lender. As of last month, Ueno reported holding roughly $800 million in public deposits, about a quarter of its total, including money from the state pension and health fund and the operators of Paraguay's giant hydroelectric dams.

Even as retirees' savings and other public money piled up at Ueno, worries were escalating inside the central bank. In June, its inspectors found a pattern of risky lending to insiders, reported ABC Color, a leading Paraguayan newspaper. Ueno had extended large sums to companies tied to its owners, beyond what the law allows and without enough collateral to cover the debts if they went bad. On a single day in September 2025, nearly $39 million had gone to three such companies. Pena repeatedly brushed off the warnings. As recently as last month, he defended Ueno and the central bank's oversight, dismissing the concerns as a smear campaign that was spooking the public.

But on Monday, it all came crashing down. Regulators investigating Ueno's loans to companies linked to its owners found poorly documented lending, the central bank said, as well as expenses the bank had wrongly counted as assets. Once the books were corrected, Ueno's capital, the cushion banks must keep to absorb losses, fell to less than half the legal minimum. The central bank seized the lender Tuesday and announced plans to move customers' accounts, along with whatever assets still hold value, to other banks before liquidating what's left. Ueno's app, cards and transfers went dark and its branches locked their doors, leaving desperate depositors lined up outside with no way to cash out their savings. On Wednesday, a rush to open new accounts elsewhere crashed other banks' mobile apps, fueling public panic. Officials say they had begun repaying depositors and opening accounts at other banks for the roughly 280,000 customers who had banked exclusively with Ueno.

"The banking system is sound," insisted Pedro Acosta Bernal, appointed interim central bank president Wednesday after Carvallo resigned at Pena's request.

Meanwhile, eight senior Ueno executives have been detained, including founder Miguel Vazquez and bank President Juan Manuel Gustale. "Prosecutors also charged 27 bank officials and business associates with offenses including breach of trust and attempted fraud," reports the AP.

theodp writes: That Was Then: The Imagine Cup competition, Microsoft explained in a 2003 press release, "seeks to provide students [aged 16-and-up] around the world with resources to use technology and Web services to solve everyday problems [...] Imagine Cup is about empowering students to apply their creativity and knowledge toward making the world a more-connected place."

This Is Now: "Building is Hard. Selling is Harder." begins the "Why Imagine Cup?" promo video for the 2027 Imagine Cup competition, which is pivoting to an AI startup-first focus in recognition that "A new era for founders is here." "Since 2003, Imagine Cup has empowered emerging innovators to turn ambitious ideas into real-world solutions with Microsoft technology," Microsoft writes of the Imagine Cup Evolution. "Now part of Microsoft for Startups, Imagine Cup enters its next chapter in 2027, opening the competition to eligible early-stage startups and founders everywhere."

An Eligibility FAQ drives home the point that Imagine Cup is no longer a student-only competition: "Imagine Cup 2027 welcomes eligible early-stage startups across seven categories; founders do not need to be students." And if you think making high school students compete against seasoned full-time employees of startup companies seems a tad unfair, Microsoft advises: "Eligible student-led startups are encouraged to enter the Student Startup category but may choose an industry category instead." The #1 overall startup will win a $250,000 cash award and $1,000,000 in startup credits. However, Student Startup category entrants are ineligible for the open category prizes (where the 2nd-place winner gets $50,000 cash and $350,000 in credits, while 3rd place is good for $25,000 and $350,000 in credits); they will instead compete for a single prize of $25,000 cash and $250,000 in credits. The Official Rules (PDF) note that all startups must have a valid Azure Subscription ID and a Microsoft for Startups account.

AMD expects its fourth-quarter revenue to reach roughly $17 billion, potentially surpassing Intel's projected $15 billion to $16 billion and putting AMD ahead of its longtime rival in quarterly sales for the first time. The milestone is being driven largely by booming demand for Epyc server processors and Instinct AI accelerators, with AMD's data center business already accounting for 64% of revenue and expected to exceed 80% in 2027. Tom's Hardware reports: For those of our readers who have been following the CPU market in general as well as AMD and Intel in particular for decades, arguably the most earth-shattering part of AMD's earnings report is its outlook for the fourth quarter. The company expects revenue of approximately $17 billion, plus or minus 3%, which implies a 66% year-over-year increase and 27% sequential growth at the midpoint. In contrast, Intel expects fourth-quarter revenue of $15 billion to $16 billion amid weakening PC demand and manufacturing capacity constraints.

If AMD meets its guidance, its quarterly sales will surpass those of its considerably bigger rival Intel for the first time in history. In fact, AMD will not only leave Intel formally behind, but its projected advantage will be approximately $1.5 billion at the midpoint of both companies' forecasts, which is a tangible lead. The development reflects the companies' increasingly different positions on the market: AMD is rapidly expanding its data center CPU and AI accelerator businesses, while Intel continues to depend heavily on PC and enterprise server processors, which sales face headwinds due to high memory prices and components shortages.

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group plans to launch Emut Bank in early 2027 as the first digital bank affiliated with a major Japanese financial institution to eliminate ATM cards, "instead having customers confirm identities using the bank's smartphone app for additional security amid a rising tide of cyberattacks," reports Nikkei Asia Review. The smartphone app will also be the only way to manage deposits, with no PC-based banking. From the report: Security has become a greater concern recently. As artificial intelligence advances, Japan has seen a surge in cyberattacks targeting companies, as well as a rise in phishing attacks aimed at stealing personal information, often targeting bank accounts. The technology being used by Emut was developed by Seven Bank, the consumer finance unit of Seven & i Holdings, operator of 7-Eleven convenience stores. Emut customers will be able to withdraw money from Seven Bank's roughly 28,000 ATMs. The network is expected to gradually expand to cover the 16,000 or so ATMs at FamilyMart convenience stores. Although MUFG Bank ATMs will not be accessible, MUFG will consider changing this in the future.

Scrapping cash cards represents a shift in what has for decades been consumers' main method of withdrawing money. The former Sumitomo Bank -- a predecessor of Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. -- is believed to have been Japan's first bank to implement cash cards, in 1969. The step away from cash cards by MUFG, Japan's largest financial institution, is likely to spur other banks to follow suit. [...] Eschewing cash cards will reduce Emut's costs, which will let it offer interest rates on deposits that are expected to be higher than MUFG Bank's usual 0.5%, depending on the terms. Interest can be paid out daily, rather than twice a year -- a first for a Japanese bank.

Tuesday, November 3, was Election Day in the United States, and the results are (mostly) in: Democrats are projected to win control of both the House and Senate in the 2026 midterms. The blue wave turned out to be more of a blue tsunami, ending Republican control of Congress for the final two years of President Donald Trump's second term.

Democrats flipped seven Republican-held Senate seats in the 2026 midterms, including surprise victories in traditionally Republican strongholds such as Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina. Kansas elected its first Democratic U.S. senator in nearly 100 years (94 years to be exact), while Texas and South Carolina sent Democrats to the Senate for the first time in decades. Democrats also picked up seats in Ohio, Iowa, Maine, and North Carolina.

Mozilla is testing a new Firefox Nightly feature called Mini Window that lets users pop an entire webpage into a small, always-on-top window stripped of most browser controls. "The idea behind the Firefox Mini Window feature is simple: allow users to move a currently open tab (or a section of a tab) into a separate mini window," writes ZDNet's Jack Wallen. "Think of it as moving a tab from one window to what appears like a web app." From the report: At first blush, there's no address bar, controls, scroll bar, or anything else that would normally be associated with Firefox. The Mini Window appears to be a web app, without having to actually create it. However, when I hover my cursor inside the Mini Window, I do see the address bar, the back/forward/reload buttons, and the window close button -- and that's it. The browser gets out of your way, so the only thing I see is the content.

On top of that (pun intended), the Mini Window stays on top of other Firefox windows, so I can have that popped-out content always in focus while I work on other things. This feature comes in handy when I'm working with limited display space (say, on a laptop) and need to reference a page while working on another. For multitasking, it comes in very handy. [...] Let's say I'm writing a paper on Linux and need to read a particular article for background information. I could have my document open in the main window, and then open the article in question in a Mini Window. I could then reference the article without having to click back and forth between them -- even when working on a smaller display.

Here's another use case I've found: When using MacOS's Stage Manager feature, I only have one window available at a time. The Mini Window bypasses that limitation, so I can have my main browser window focused as well as the page open in the Mini Window. Another handy way I like to use Mini Window is to open a favorite search engine, move it to a Mini Window, and then I have an always-ready search tool at my fingertips. I could also open my favorite AI service and use it in the same way.