Month: August 2017

Enlarge / Ajit Pai, Jessica Rosenworcel, and Brendan Carr prepare to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee during a confirmation hearing on July 19, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla)

The US Senate today confirmed the nominations of Republican Brendan Carr and Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel to fill the two empty seats on the Federal Communications Commission.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai congratulated the commissioners in a statement. “As I know from working with each of them for years, they have distinguished records of public service and will be valuable assets to the FCC in the years to come,” Pai said. “Their experience at the FCC makes them particularly well-suited to hit the ground running. I’m pleased that the FCC will once again be at full strength and look forward to collaborating to close the digital divide, promote innovation, protect consumers, and improve the agency’s operations.”

Carr served as Pai’s Wireless, Public Safety and International Legal Advisor for three years. After President Trump elevated Pai to the chairmanship in January, Pai appointed Carr to become the FCC’s general counsel.

Enlarge / Michelle Carter listens in during her sentencing hearing Thursday with one of her attorneys by her side. (credit: Clickondetroit.com)

A Massachusetts woman convicted of involuntary manslaughter because of text messages that cajoled her 18-year-old friend to commit suicide was sentenced Thursday to serve 15 months in jail.

Michelle Carter, now 20, faced a maximum 20-year prison term. Her unusual prosecution was closely watched, and it occurred in a state that has no law forbidding people from encouraging suicide. But the authorities—including a Bristol County judge—concluded that in 2014 Carter sent Conrad Roy text messages that wantonly and recklessly caused him to poison himself in a car with carbon monoxide. She was 17 years old at the time.

Judge Lawrence Moniz, who presided over the week-long, non-jury trial in June, issued the sentence in a packed courtroom in Taunton Trial Court, where Carter was tried as a juvenile. Noting that the prosecution was novel, Moniz stayed enforcement of any jail time until Carter exhausts her appeals in state court.

Enlarge / The neutron source at Oak Ridge National Lab. (credit: Oak Ridge National Lab)

Neutrinos are noted for being extremely reluctant to interact with other matter. While it's possible to build hardware that will detect them, these detectors tend to be enormous in order to provide sufficient material for the neutrinos to interact with. Those interactions also take the form of energetic events that transform the identity of particles (for example, converting protons to neutrons).

Given the neutrino's low mass and tendency not to interact, the idea of detecting one simply bumping into another particle seems almost ludicrous. But that's what scientists from Oak Ridge National Lab are reporting today. They've seen brief flashes as atoms get nudged by a neutrino, which imparts a tiny bit of its tiny momentum to the atom's nucleus.

Oak Ridge National Lab is home to some hardware called the Spallation Neutron Source. This accelerates a beam of protons and smashes them into a tank of mercury. This creates debris that includes lots of neutrons, which are used for a variety of scientific purposes. But the debris also includes some neutrinos that are otherwise lost in the spray of particles that comes flowing out of the collisions.

Enlarge / An F/A-18 flies above the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) as its pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Jaime Struck, prepares for the first arrested landing aboard the new carrier on July 28. (credit: US Navy)

Last week, an F/A-18F Super Hornet from the US Navy's Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 23 successfully landed and then took off from the recently commissioned USS Gerald R. Ford—the first full use of the ship's next-generation flight arresting system and electromagnetic catapult. The landing and launch off the Virginia coast are a pair of major milestones for the systems, which have seen their share of controversy (and cost overruns). But the test doesn't close the book on the catapult's problems.

The catapult, called the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS), has suffered from control problems that have prevented the Navy from certifying it for use with fully loaded strike aircraft. Earlier launches at a test site at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey, in April of 2014 caused a high level of vibration in the wings of F/A-18s loaded with 480-gallon wing-mounted fuel tanks—the configuration commonly used to launch aircraft on long-range strike missions. The vibrations were so strong that Navy officials were concerned about the safety of launching aircraft fully loaded.

US Navy

Enlarge / A Charter Spectrum vehicle. (credit: Charter)

Charter Communications has moved 30 percent of the customers it acquired in a blockbuster merger onto new pricing plans, resulting in many people paying higher prices.

Charter closed the acquisitions of Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Bright House Networks in May 2016. Before the merger, Charter had about 6.8 million customers; afterwards, Charter had 25.4 million customers in 41 states and became the second-largest US cable company after Comcast.

The merger was quickly followed by customer complaints about pricing in the acquired territories. In November 2016, we noted that "tens of thousands of ex-Time Warner Cable video subscribers have canceled their service since the company was bought by Charter, and pricing changes appear to be the driving factor." At the time, Charter CEO Thomas Rutledge explained that the TWC video customer base was "mispriced" and needed to be moved "in the right direction."

The consumer gaming world might be in a tizzy about 4K consoles and displays of late, but that resolution standard wasn't nearly enough for one team of PC tinkerers. The folks over at Linus Tech Tips have posted a very entertaining video showing off a desktop PC build capable of running (some) games at an astounding 16K resolution. That's a 15260×8640, for those counting the over 132 million pixels being pushed every frame—64 times the raw pixel count of a standard 1080p display and 16 times that of a 4K display.

The key to the build is four Quadro P5000 video cards provided by Nvidia. While each card performs similarly to a consumer-level GTX1080 (8.9 teraflops, 2560 parallel cores), these are pro-tier cards designed for animators and other high-end graphic work, often used for massive jumbotrons and other multi-display or multi-projector installations.

The primary difference between Quadro and consumer cards is that these come with 16GB of video RAM. Unfortunately, the multi-display Mosaic technology syncing the images together means that mirrored memory doesn't stack, leading to the rig's most significant bottleneck. All told, the graphics cards alone would cost over $10,000, including a "quadrosync" card that ties them all together to run a single image across 16 displays.

Bixby versus the Google Assistant. Video edited by Justin Wolfson. (video link)

Bixby—Samsung's voice assistant designed to take on Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google's Google Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana—has finally been released. Its launch has already been a bumpy one—Bixby was supposed to launch three months ago with the Galaxy S8, and while that happened in Korea, getting Bixby to master English has resulted in delay after delay.

Normally, late software wouldn't be a huge deal for the Galaxy S8 launch, but Samsung felt so strongly about pairing Bixby with the Galaxy S8 that it built a hardware button onto the device specifically for Bixby. During the long delay, S8 customers created apps that turned the Bixby button into a general-purpose "convenience" key—a button users can configure themselves. But Samsung didn't like this. The company pushed out a series of updates designed to disable apps that changed the Bixby button and earned a good deal of ire from customers.