An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider: A small community of people at the southern tip of Texas just received what some of its residents are calling a "shocking" and "concerning" warning about SpaceX's upcoming launch attempt of a Mars rocket ship prototype. Residents told Business Insider a county sheriff went door-to-door on Saturday night to hand-deliver printed notices to the community, where approximately 20 people own homes... The notice says "action required" and warns of "potential risk to health and safety" during SpaceX's upcoming launch attempt of Starhopper: a stubby yet roughly 60-foot-tall (18-meter-tall) steel prototype with a single, truck-size Raptor rocket engine... The notice issued to residents says police will sound their sirens to warn residents about 10 minutes before liftoff. According to the notice, a roughly 15-minute flight window will open at 5 p.m. ET (4 p.m. CT) on Monday night. The notice then says: "There is a risk that a malfunction of the SpaceX vehicle during flight will create an overpressure event that can break windows. Therefore, in order to protect Public Health and Safety, it is recommended that you consider temporarily vacating yourself, other occupants, and pets, from the area during the Space Flight Activities. At a minimum, you must exit your home or structure and be outside of any building on your property when you hear the police sirens which will be activated at the time of the Space Flight Activity to avoid or minimize the risk of injury." An "overpressure event" is a blastwave that's often caused by a rapid explosion... The public health and safety notice comes about a month after SpaceX's most recent launch of Starhopper. That flight inadvertently ignited a grass fire that burned through more than 100 acres of coastal wildlife refuge, thousands of acres of which surround the launch site and hamlet. SpaceX has responded to the incident by putting together a better fire-prevention and response plan, according to Bryan Winton, manager of the Lower Rio Grande Valley national wildlife refuge at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. SpaceX is now coordinating more closely with local agencies on its launch plans and fire safety, has installed five new remote-control water cannons on its launchpad to douse flames (there used to be only one), is helping perform controlled burns, and more, Winton told Business Insider on Thursday.

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XKCD cartoonist Randall Munroe says he received "a huge number of submissions" in a contest to choose an additional city for his upcoming book tour. The challenge? "Write the best story using nothing but book covers... You'll get extra credit for including as many books and people as possible." And the winning entry involved 98 people in an earnest community project featuring Alaskans young and old, in a series of four YouTube videos that lasts nearly three minutes. ("Listen to me. This idea is brilliant. Stop staring at screens. If you love me, get a life...!") Munroe applauded their efforts in a blog post announcing their winning entry. I'm a sucker for (a) public libraries, and (b) people who get so excited about glaciers that they lose their train of thought." Several runners-up will receive a personalized drawing of their bookstore or library -- or a signed book. Runners up include the Content Bookstore in Northfield, Minnesota, who assembled over 60 people for a story in the form of a choose-your-own adventure flowchart. And Naitian Zhou of Ann Arbor, Michigan built an interactive tool that generates arbitrary grammatical sentences by running a database of book titles through Python language tools. ("Don't judge a book by its cover," jokes its web page. "Judge it by its linguistic productivity instead!") The How To book tour starts on September 3rd in Cambridge, and Munroe says "I'll be appearing in conversation with some very cool people, including researchers, journalists, and cartoonists. We'll be discussing How To, science, comics, the destruction of the universe, and the ethics of hitting drones with tennis balls."

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E-ZPass for news. I have an E-ZPass transponder on my car. This means I can drive on the highways of 18 states and the Canadian province of Ontario. The tolls are charged through the EZP system. I could drive from NY to Chicago and use it on every toll on the way, or to Florida. Anyway, I think this idea would work really well for paywalls. Collect the money if I decide to read a New Yorker or LA Times piece, even though I have't got a subscription with either, which is analogous of being able to use the toll roads of Georgia even though I'm a resident of New York.

E-ZPass for news. I have an E-ZPass transponder on my car. This means I can drive on the highways of 18 states and the Canadian province of Ontario. The tolls are charged through the EZP system. I could drive from NY to Chicago and use it on every toll on the way, or to Florida. Anyway, I think this idea would work really well for paywalls. Collect the money if I decide to read a New Yorker or LA Times piece, even though I have't got a subscription with either, which is analogous of being able to use the toll roads of Georgia even though I'm a resident of New York.

"The fight for space internet supremacy is on," writes the consumer policy expert at BroadbandNow, calculating the benefits of these additional broadband competitors: Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites for broadband internet access are beginning to display signs of real potential. Recently, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin pulled back the curtain on its space intentions by announcing Project Kuiper, a 3,236-satellite constellation. Additionally, Elon Musk's SpaceX Starlink recently launched a rocket containing 60 satellites from Florida's Cape Canaveral... Both players, alongside others like OneWeb, are spending billions in space in hopes of making further billions annually once the satellites go into service for consumers in the US and around the globe. SpaceX will initially launch service to North America, but once its full array is in place, the company has plans to roll the service out across the entire planet. Ostensibly, anywhere with access to open skies could be covered. Amazon has global aspirations for its project as well... The arrival of this technology is likely to drive down monthly internet prices for hundreds-of-millions of Americans... According to further analysis of our market-wide pricing database covering plans and pricing from more than 2,000 ISPs, the average "lowest available monthly price" for the estimated 104 million Americans with only one wired broadband provider is $68. For the 75 million Americans with two choices, that average lowest price drops to $59. For the lucky 15 million Americans with five or more choices, it's $47. Because LEO technology will ostensibly be available everywhere in the US, as well as globally, this indicates the powerful influence the entrance of the technology will have on internet prices as new markets gain access to an additional true "broadband" option and competition heats-up. Our projections show that that low-latency, LEO satellite internet is likely to have a similar impact on average regional prices as wired, low-latency wired providers. Extrapolating this additional competitor across all US households, the introduction of LEO satellite internet could save Americans over $30 billion... Shortly after, these same transformative benefits could spread to countries across the globe, permanently altering the landscape of the internet as we know it.

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Joe Walsh, radio host and ex-congressman, says Trump is unfit for office and must be denied a second presidential term.

A helicopter and a light plane collide over the island of Mallorca, killing seven people.

A helicopter and a light plane collide over the island of Mallorca, killing seven people.

Hassan Nasrallah says his movement 'will not allow such an aggression' after two Israeli drones crash in Beirut.

Hassan Nasrallah says his movement 'will not allow such an aggression' after two Israeli drones crash in Beirut.

Standard, a popular Javascript style guide library that is downloaded about three million times each month, is beginning to show ads when installed through npm, a developer announced this week. The move, which has been pegged as an experiment, comes as the developer looks to find sustainable ways to support contributions to the open source development. In a post, Feross Aboukhadijeh, a developer of Standard, said whenever Standard 14 is installed, "we'll display a message from a company that supports open source. The sponsorship pays directly for maintainer time. That is, writing new features, fixing bugs, answering user questions, and improving documentation." The announcement has sparked a debate in the community with some suggesting that there should be a better way to support the FOSS developers without seeing ads on the terminal.

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UK police have seized Bitcoin worth more than £920,000 ($1.1 million) from a 27-year-old convicted of computer crimes -- and they're now planning to sell it to compensate his victims. An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: Authorities said Grant West used a tool called Sentry MBR to launch brute-force attacks against 17 companies, where he gained access to user accounts, which he later hijacked and resold on the dark web to other criminals. London police said the list of victims included some high profile names such as Uber, Groupon, T Mobile, Just Eat, Asda, and Sainsburys... Authorities said West, who used the moniker of "Courvoisier," started trading stolen accounts on the dark web in March 2015, and made more than 47,000 sales before his arrest. He also sold cannabis, along with hacking tutorials. West did all of this using his girlfriend's laptop. After his arrest, UK police said they found "fullz" (a term short for "full credentials" and used to describe email, username, and password combos) for more than 100,000 people on this laptop. They also found an SD card storing 78 million individual usernames and passwords, as well as 63,000 credit and debit card details. The Guardian reports that West agreed to give up his Bitcoin after a judge told him that if he didn't, he'd spend an additional four years in jail.

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Slashdot reader sfcrazy writes: The Linux Foundation hosted the executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation, Deb Goodkin, at the Open Source Summit in San Diego. In this episode of Let's Talk, we sat down with Goodkin to talk about the FreeBSD project and the foundation. "How did they let you in?" jokes their interviewer. "They didn't realize that FreeBSD was not a Linux distribution," the executive director replies. "No, but seriously, they've been very welcoming to the FreeBSD community and wanting to include our voice in conversations about open source." FreeBSD is about five and a half million lines of code, versus 35 million for Linux, so "If you want to learn, it's a great way to learn... Someone said they believed that they were a great Linux sys-admin because of knowing FreeBSD." Founded in 2000 in Boulder, Colorado, the FreeBSD project is a 501(c)(3) -- a public charity -- where the Linux Foundation is a 501(c)(6) -- a trade association. They have 400 committers, and "We're known for excellent documentation," the executive director says in the interview, describing how the community works to welcome new-comers and mentor new contributors. "We actually descended from the original Berkeley Unix. Some of those original people who worked on Berkeley Unix are still involved in the FreeBSD project. They're very approachable. So these young people go to conferences, and here you have Kirk McKusick, who developed UFS and still works on file systems, and he's there, and he's telling stories about back in the day, when he was at Berkeley working with Bill Joy, and he is really interested in helping these new people contribute." Companies using FreeBSD include Netflix and Apple -- and according to Phoronix, the number of FreeBSD ports has increased to nearly 37,000 packages.

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PLEASE EDIT