Month: July 2016

Bill Ingalls/NASA

The Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft is raised vertical after it was rolled out by train to the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Monday, July 4. This gallery highlights life for the astronauts before launch.

16 more images in gallery

Perhaps it's the bleak, Soviet-style block apartments. It could be the dust-blown, almost featureless landscape. Or maybe it's the scraggly trees that eke out their meager existence in Baikonur, with their lower trunks painted white so the bark does not crack during the bitter winter freezes. This lonely town in southern Kazakhstan is not one of planet Earth's garden spots.

As they began to build a spaceport to launch first satellites and then humans into space, the Soviets chose this desolate area of the Asian steppe in the 1950s both for its remoteness and its access to the Syr Darya River.  Amusingly, "Baikonur" means “rich soil,” an appellation that was true for the original Baikonur hundreds of kilometers to the north. To throw off American spies looking for its launch facilities during the Cold War, the Soviet Union built a fake launch site at the real town of Baikonur. Eventually, spy planes observed the southern site and its launches, so the Soviets simply called the new site Baikonur as well.

In the post-Space Shuttle world this camel-trafficked region serves as the launch site for all Russia and US human spaceflights, from the very same pad that Yuri Gagarin blasted off of in 1961. On Wednesday, at 7:36pm ET, the latest launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome will carry Expedition 48—Soyuz commander Anatoly Ivanishin of Roscosmos, and engineers Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Kate Rubins of NASA—into space. They will spend about six months on board the International Space Station.

FBI Director James Comey slammed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her Staff, and the State Department for reckless treatment of classified data in unsecured e-mails. But he stopped short of recommending prosecution. (credit: Brookings Institution)

In a surprise 15-minute press conference on Tuesday, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey issued a harsh assessment of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server, calling her handling of classified data "extremely careless" and suggesting that it was possible her home-based mail server had been breached by hackers.

But Comey said he would recommend no criminal charges be filed against Clinton, citing that there was a lack of evidence that Clinton had intended to expose or transmit classified data, or that she mishandled information in a willful oversight of her responsibilities. That decision has already drawn calls from Republicans for an independent investigation.

Comey's conclusion was that no reasonable prosecutor would try to make a case out of the evidence collected in the investigation. Though the Justice Department has certainly done so with other cases of mishandling classified data, those cases have involved more willful acting, and anything not directly involving espionage generally results in relatively light punishment.

Enlarge / The 16GB iPhone could be on its way out. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Speculation about the headphone jack has dominated most of the conversation about the next iPhone, but here's a rumor that should make everyone happy: citing "a person familiar with Apple's plans," The Wall Street Journal reports that the next iPhone will get rid of the 16GB storage option. The base model would reportedly jump up to 32GB—a more reasonable minimum for casual iPhone users who still want to store plenty of photos and apps (and install updates without running into storage problems).

Apple has made several changes to iOS in the last year or two to make 16GB (and, horror of horrors, 8GB) iPhones and iPads more livable. It has reduced the amount of storage space needed to install updates, it has introduced features like iCloud Photo Library that lean on the cloud to free up local storage, and App Thinning reduces the size of installed apps behind the scenes. But this stuff is countered in part by space-eating camera features like Live Photos, 12 megapixel images, and 4K video. Selling a 64GB model for $100 more than the 16GB models may have helped Apple's average iPhone selling price, but the user experience has gone downhill as time has gone on.

Apple bumped up its mid- and top-tier iPhone capacities two years ago when it introduced the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and there was never an 8GB version of the iPhone 5S at the low end. But that 16GB option has been the entry model since the iPhone 3GS came out in 2009 (an eternity ago in phone years). The report doesn't say whether the higher-end 64 and 128GB iPhones will also get a storage bump, but in any case it would be nice to be able to recommend an iPhone without also having to recommend that $100 upgrade.