New submitter pele writes: Captain Kirk alias William Shatner has just safely completed his first trip to space and back, and in the process has become the oldest person ever to have been to space. More news and coverage at BBC and Evening Standard. Blue Origin took the 90-year-old just about 60 miles (100km) above the Earth's surface where those aboard got to experience a short period of weightlessness. The trip only lasted about 10 minutes. "Everybody in the world needs to do this," the Canadian actor told Mr Bezos after landing back on Earth. "It was unbelievable." In tears, he added: "What you have given me is the most profound experience. I'm so filled with emotion about what just happened. I hope I never recover from this. I hope I can retain what I feel now. I don't want to lose it."

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The networking giant says it has turned a corner in its attempt to adapt to the cloud era. From a report: Cisco is hardly a failure. It produces billions of dollars in annual profits and is generally regarded as stable and well-run. But investors feared that its steady operations could lead to a slow-motion descent into obsolescence in an industry that can be brutal to anyone who falls a half-step behind. The best example of a tech giant stumbling then regaining its dominance is probably Microsoft, and analysts regularly hold it up as a role model for Cisco. Microsoft's decline, which began about the same time as Cisco's, was largely the result of a progression of disappointing products. That began to change in 2014, when new Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella started selling tons of copies of popular software such as Excel and Word as subscription services rather than one-time purchase products and built a formidable cloud computing division. Microsoft is now the only U.S. company other than Apple with a market value of more than $2 trillion. Chuck Robbins has held his job as Cisco's CEO just one year less than Nadella. In recent months, he's begun to insist that his company has finally reached its inflection point. Cisco acknowledged years ago that it had failed to capitalize on the chance to build the initial infrastructure for cloud computing, says Robbins, and responded with a significant, if slow-developing, overhaul of its strategy. "We were going to build technology for the next transition," he says. "We did that. Now we're seeing the benefit." Cisco's initial problem was partially a lack of flexibility. When Amazon, Google, and Microsoft began building cloud computing data centers, they wanted components, software, and machines that were tailored to their needs. Cisco insisted on selling the same expensive, uncustomizable equipment that was always the core of its business. The burgeoning cloud companies were only too happy to take their business elsewhere. Robbins can point to significant changes during his six-year tenure. Cisco has made a string of acquisitions that have turned it into one of the top 10 software companies in the world by revenue. Software and services have surpassed hardware and now make up more than half of Cisco's revenue. Its expected future revenue for outstanding fees from these products totals $30 billion.

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Activision unveiled its Ricochet anti-cheat system for Call of Duty games as it tries to attack a longstanding cheating problem that has frustrated a lot of players. From a report: The new system will get rid of players cheating in Call of Duty: Warzone later this year and it will debut with Call of Duty: Vanguard, the new premium game coming on multiple platforms on November 5. Activision, whose parent company Activision Blizzard has been sued for having an alleged toxic culture of its own, said in its announcement that cheating in Call of Duty is frustrating for players, developers, and the entire community. The anti-cheat team has made great strides in fighting this persistent issue that affects so many, but the company said it knows more must be done. Ricochet is supported by a team of dedicated professionals focused on fighting unfair play. The Ricochet anti-cheat initiative is a multi-faceted approach to combat cheating, featuring new server-side tools which monitor analytics to identify cheating, enhanced investigation processes to stamp out cheaters, updates to strengthen account security, and more. Ricochet's backend anti-cheat security features will launch alongside Call of Duty: Vanguard, and later this year with the Pacific update coming to Call of Duty: Warzone. In addition to server enhancements coming with Ricochet is a new PC kernel-level driver, developed internally for the Call of Duty franchise, and launching first for Call of Duty: Warzone. This driver will assist in the identification of cheaters, reinforcing and strengthening the overall server security. The kernel-level driver launches alongside the Pacific update for Warzone later this year. Further reading: Cheat Maker Is Not Afraid of Call of Duty's New Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat.

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Like everywhere else, China has seen the cost of solar power dive over the last decade, with a 63 percent drop between 2011 and 2018 alone. In line with that, the installation of solar has risen dramatically. From a report: Currently, a third of the entire planet's new solar capacity is being commissioned in China; the country passed the installed capacity of the US in 2013 and Germany in 2015, and it now has over 250 GW active -- well more than double what its economic plan had specified by this point. Given that China plans to hit net zero emissions by 2060, it is likely to continue this building spree. But the forecast is not all rosy. Most of China's population is located in the country's southeast. The best solar resources (in terms of cloudless days and available land) are in the northwest, which also happens to be sparsely populated. This mismatch has left solar facing constraints due to limits in the ability of China's grids to shift power across its vast distances. The output of solar plants in the northwest has frequently ended up curtailed, as there's no capacity to send it where it's needed. As a result, it's been somewhat difficult to fully understand the economics of solar power in China. To get a clearer picture, the researchers built a model that takes into account most of the factors influencing solar's performance. The model tracks changes in technology, economics, solar resources, and the Chinese grid for the period from 2020 to 2060. It used six years of satellite weather data to estimate typical productivity in different areas of the country, and it included information on existing land use that would interfere with solar-farm siting.

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China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope has detected more than 1,600 fast radio bursts from a single enigmatic system. From a report: Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are one of the greatest mysteries of our universe. Coming from deep space, these outbursts can flash and fade in a matter of milliseconds, yet in each instance can release as much energy as the sun does in a year. They pop up all across the sky multiple times a day, but most appear to be one-off events and are thus hard to catch. First discovered in 2007, FRBs have challenged and tantalized scientists seeking to uncover their obscure origins and to use them as unique tools for probing the depths of intergalactic space. Now, using the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, an international team has reported the largest set of FRB events ever detected in history. According to their paper published in Nature today, between August and October 2019 the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in southwestern China recorded a total of 1,652 such brief and bright outbursts from a single repeating FRB source in a dwarf galaxy three billion light years away. Besides dramatically boosting the total number of known FRB events, the observations also revealed a very wide range of brightnesses among the recorded events, offering new clues about the astrophysical nature of their mysterious source. "The study is very thorough, with a level of details and sensitivity we've never had before," says astrophysicist Emily Petroff from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and McGill University in Canada, who is not involved in the research. "Such in-depth analyses of individual sources will be a top priority in FRB research in the near future."

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Epic Games keeps piling up lawsuits with app store owners. This time, Google is countersuing Epic for breach of contract. From a report: Epic signed contracts with both Google and Apple, pledging to use the default payment systems for in-app purchases. As part of its push for more open payment systems, though (and to dodge each platform's 30 percent fee), Epic boldly pushed out updates to the Android and iOS apps that switched the payment processing from the platforms' in-app purchases to Epic's in-house system. Google and Apple both allege this action was a breach of their app store contracts with Epic. Apple sued and got its ruling last month. Epic was ordered to pay $3.65 million in damages, covering Apple's lost revenue from Epic's three months of self-powered payments. Following that ruling, Google wants its missing money, too, and now it's countersuing Epic, hoping for a similar ruling. Google's suit reads, "Epic willfully breached the DDA [Developer Distribution Agreement] by submitting a version of Fortnite for publication on Google Play with a payment method other than Google Play Billing for purchases of in-app content. By doing this, Epic denied Google its service fee under the DDA for any purchases made through the app outside of Google Play Billing." Google continues: "The users that downloaded the non-compliant version of Fortnite before its removal from Google Play are still able to use Epic's hotfixed external payment mechanism to make in-app purchases -- allowing Epic to evade its contractually agreed service fee to Google for those purchases." Google argues that "Epic has alternatively been unjustly enriched at Google's expense" and is seeking restitution of its missing earnings and damages.

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The boss of Europe's top meat processor said beef will become a luxury like champagne because of the climate impact of producing it. From a report: "Beef is not going to be super climate friendly," Danish Crown Chief Executive Officer Jais Valeur said in an interview with Danish newspaper Berlingske. "It will be a luxury product that we eat when we want to treat ourselves." Valeur said pork would be a more climate-friendly protein. Danish Crown is one of Europe's largest pork producers, although it is also a player in the beef market. Meat companies are coming under pressure to curb greenhouse gases, with 57% of all food industry emissions coming from making animal products, according to one study. Tackling methane emissions from livestock is one of the most critical climate challenges for producers.

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The global supply chain is slowing down at the very moment when Americans are demanding that it go into overdrive. The Atlantic: Is it just me, or does it feel like America is running out of everything? I visited CVS last week to pick up some at-home COVID-19 tests. They'd been sold out for a week, an employee told me. So I asked about paper towels. "We're out of those too," he said. "Try Walgreens." I drove to a Walgreens that had paper towels. But when I asked a pharmacist to fill some very common prescriptions, he told me the store had run out. "Try the Target up the road," he suggested. Target's pharmacy had the meds, but its front area was alarmingly barren, like the canned-food section of a grocery store one hour before a hurricane makes landfall. This is the economy now. One-hour errands are now multi-hour odysseys. Next-day deliveries are becoming day-after-next deliveries. That car part you need? It'll take an extra week, sorry. The book you were looking for? Come back in November. The baby crib you bought? Make it December. Eyeing a new home-improvement job that requires several construction workers? Haha, pray for 2022. The U.S. economy isn't yet experiencing a downturn akin to the 1970s period of stagflation. This is something different, and quite strange. Americans are settling into a new phase of the pandemic economy, in which GDP is growing but we're also suffering from a dearth of a shocking array of things -- test kits, car parts, semiconductors, ships, shipping containers, workers. This is the Everything Shortage. The Everything Shortage is not the result of one big bottleneck in, say, Vietnamese factories or the American trucking industry. We are running low on supplies of all kinds due to a veritable hydra of bottlenecks.

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One of the saddest things I've ever heard is Jeremy Lin saying "I think the NBA has given up on me." I would say to him, they had reasons to give up on you when you were 18 and every year since then. That's the way the world works. Assholes climb the ladder, and then think they can stop listening.

I was talking with my friend Dave Jacobs last night and we got around to what should be done with Facebook. The only thing to do when a tech company gets too big, is to force them to unbundle. Bundling is how their size becomes a problem for us. So, for example, Google owning the dominant search engine and the dominant browser means they're inevitably going to turn the web into a perfect way to continue to own search. That's all that's going to matter to them. But the web has more to do. Google doesn't care. Facebook has also been successful at strangling the open web, forcing all writing on the net to flow through them. Or at least keeping it from flowing outside of them. If Facebook's fat ass wasn't squatting over the web, there would be a lot more movement. That might not solve the problem of Nazis ruining the world, but at least it gives the rest of us a chance to organize and solve the other vexing problems we have to deal with. RIght now all we're tasked with doing is making Zuck even richer, and even Zuck must be bored with that by now. The task for FB is to make it easy for the rest of us to run our own FB's and stay in touch with the people who use his FB. That's what happens when you get as big as they are. And it's far from an unsolvable problem. In fact they already have all the software written.

A coalition of nonprofits on Wednesday debuted HowToStopFacebook.org, a fresh push to encourage greater government regulation of the social networking giant aimed at forcing the company to change its business model. From a report: The campaign hopes to take the outrage expressed by legislators over the revelations of whistleblower Frances Haugen and translate it into action. The campaign is pushing for two goals: A Congressional investigation with subpoena power into harms caused by Facebook; and a strong federal data privacy law that makes it illegal for companies like Facebook and YouTube to collect the vast amounts of data they use to personalize recommendations. The more than 30 groups involved include Accountable Tech, Article 19, Center for Digital Democracy, Fairplay, Global Voices, Media Justice, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Presente, Public Knowledge, United We Dream, Ranking Digital Rights, SumOfUs, Win Without War, and the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center.

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It's hard to imagine approval rating means anything in 2021. Even if you don't approve of Biden, are you really going to vote for Trump? It seems that even the Dems could market that you're better off not electing Hitler.

AMD warned last week that its chips are experiencing performance issues in Windows 11, and now Microsoft's first update to its new OS has reportedly made the problems worse. From a report: TechPowerUp reports that it's seeing much higher latency, which means worse performance, after the Windows 11 update went live yesterday. AMD and Microsoft found two issues with Windows 11 on Ryzen processors. Windows 11 can cause L3 cache latency to triple, slowing performance by up to 15 percent in certain games. The second issue affects AMD's preferred core technology, that shifts threads over to the fastest core on a processor. AMD says this second bug could impact performance on CPU-reliant tasks. TechPowerUp measured the L3 cache latency on its Ryzen 7 2700X at around 10ns, and Windows 11 increased this to 17ns. "This was made much worse with the October 12 'Patch Tuesday' update, driving up the latency to 31.9ns," says TechPowerUp. That's a huge jump, and the exact type of issue AMD warned about.

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The US overtook China as the world's biggest source of bitcoin mining two months after Beijing banned crypto mining this year, new data have revealed. From a report: China's share of the global hashrate -- the computational power required to create bitcoin -- fell from 44 per cent to zero between May and July, showed figures published by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance on Wednesday. The country accounted for three-quarters of the global hashrate in 2019. The US share of the global hashrate increased from 17 per cent in April to 35 per in August, while Kazakhstan rose 10 percentage points to 18 per cent in the same period. China's State Council, or cabinet, banned cryptocurrency mining and trading in May, citing environmental and financial concerns. The decision prompted an exodus of miners in search of cheap energy and crypto-friendly politicians. China's bitcoin mining ban resulted in the "great mining migration," said Sam Tabar, chief strategy officer at Bit Digital, a New York-based bitcoin miner. The company suspended its operations in China, which it had been winding down since October 2020, after the prohibition. Michel Rauchs, digital assets lead at the closely watched Cambridge tracker, noted that "the effect of the Chinese crackdown is an increased geographic distribution of hashrate across the world," adding that it could be seen as "a positive development for network security and the decentralised principles of bitcoin."

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To people who wanted to use a custom domain for their Drummer blogs, we now have an answer. There's a new head-level attribute for your blog.opml file that tells the CMS where the links should point. It works on my test blog for the clueless newbie.