Month: September 2018

Enlarge / SpaceX launched a similar satellite, Telstar 19 Vantage, in July of this year. (credit: SpaceX)

12:55am ET Monday Update: A little more than an hour after its launch window opened—the delay was due to remnant thunderstorms in the area—SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launched from Florida early on Monday morning. The rocket's first stage made a flawless flight, and then descended to a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean and safely landed.

About 10 minutes after the launch, the rocket's second stage completed its initial burn, with a secondary burn and satellite deployment expected about 40 minutes after liftoff.

This was SpaceX's 16th mission of 2018. Two thirds of the orbital launches from U.S. soil this year have been flown by the California-based company.

Enlarge / Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the third day of his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill September 6, 2018 in Washington, DC. (credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

On Friday, during the final day of hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) had an interesting exchange over recent privacy cases with the Supreme Court judicial nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

"I've talked repeatedly in this hearing about how technology will be one of the huge issues with the Fourth Amendment going forward," said Kavanaugh, who serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Opening their six-minute tête-à-tête, Leahy began by asking the appellate court judge about about what Kavanaugh wrote in November 2015 in a case known as Klayman v. Obama. In that case, a well-known conservative activist attorney, Larry Klayman, sued the then-president on June 7, 2013—the day after the Snowden revelations became public. The complaint argued that the National Security Agency's telephone metadata program ("Section 215"), which gathered records of all incoming and outgoing calls for years on end, was unconstitutional.

Enlarge / The invitation Apple sent to members of the press. (credit: Apple)

On September 12, 2018, Apple will hold its second major event at the Steve Jobs Theater at the company's new Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California. An invitation was sent out to press and other invitees with the above image and the words "gather round." This is an allusion to Apple Park, which shares that shape. But there might be more to it.

In any case, we expect the event to focus primarily on iPhones and the Apple Watch, just like the event on the same day in the same room last year, when Apple announced the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone X, and Apple Watch series 3. We'll dive deep on each possible product announcement momentarily, but first let's talk about Apple's general focus and strategy right now.

While last year's iPhones have outperformed the rest of the smartphone industry, smartphone sales are not growing like they used to. A number of factors are behind this, market saturation being a major one. Apple has generally found the most success in the past by diving into developing-product categories and refining them; that's what the company did with the iPod, iPad, iPhone, Watch, and AirPods.

SEATTLE—We've already had a lot to say about the games we saw at last week's PAX West. Our coverage kicked off with an exclusive Valve studio visit and demo of its new card game Artifact, and we continued with looks at surprise '90s rebirths and Nintendo Switch offerings.

But as Ars' sole PAX West attendee, I needed downtime to genuinely process the remainder of what I saw. And after a week to think on it, I'm ready to identify this year's stand-out games. A fan-first expo may not necessarily be the best place to judge certain game types, particularly deeper, systems- and story-loaded fare, and PAX was missing megaton titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout 76 (although Bethesda was giving out Vault Boy masks). But we think our choice of notable PAX demos says plenty about the surprises and fun the show had in store.

Enlarge / Alpha Centauri, which features prominently in our explanation. (credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2 Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin)

Earlier this week, we covered astronomers' discovery of fast-moving jets of particles, produced by the object that resulted from a collision of neutron stars. The jets were imaged at two different time points, roughly half a year apart. During that time, the jets appeared to be moving faster than light itself when viewed from Earth.

In the article itself, I mentioned the "viewed from Earth" part to indicate that this apparent speed was a matter of perspective and that the jets were not actually outpacing light. I did that because I would need a separate full-length article to explain how that works. But, naturally, I got called on this in the comments—everyone knows nothing moves faster than light, so how could I possibly just skip over the fact that something looked like it was doing so?

As I said, an explanation would demand a full-length article. So that's what you're getting.