Month: October 2018

Enlarge / This artist rendering shows an aerial view of the liftoff of the SLS rocket during Exploration Mission 1. (credit: NASA)

Boeing has been building the core stage of NASA's Space Launch System rocket for the better part of this decade, and the process has not always gone smoothly, with significant overruns and multiyear delays. A new report from NASA's inspector general makes clear just how bad the development process has gone, laying the blame mostly at the feet of Boeing.

"We found Boeing’s poor performance is the main reason for the significant cost increases and schedule delays to developing the SLS core stage," the report, signed by NASA Inspector General Paul Martin, states. "Specifically, the project’s cost and schedule issues stem primarily from management, technical, and infrastructure issues directly related to Boeing’s performance."

As of August 2018, the report says, NASA has spent a total of $11.9 billion on the SLS. Even so, the rocket's critical core stage will be delivered more than three years later than initially planned—at double the anticipated cost. Overall, there are a number of top-line findings in this report, which cast a mostly if not completely negative light on Boeing and, to a lesser extent, NASA and its most expensive spaceflight project.

Enlarge (credit: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles)

Waymo's self-driving cars have driven 10 million miles on public roads, the company announced on Wednesday. That puts the company way, way ahead of any of its rivals. Only one other company has announced more than a million miles of testing. And that was Uber, which announced 2 million miles last year but was forced to freeze its public testing after a deadly crash in March.

The milestone is one of many signs that Waymo has a sizable lead in the race to commercialize driverless car technology. Waymo says it is planning to launch a taxi service in the Phoenix area before the end of the year. One of Waymo's leading rivals, GM's Cruise, is aiming to launch a commercial taxi service next year. Most other companies working on driverless car technology aren't planning commercial launches until the early 2020s.

Rivals say testing miles are an overrated metric

If you talk to Waymo's rivals, most of them are quick to dismiss the significance of testing miles. They argue that quality is far more important than quantity when it comes to driverless car testing. It's easy to rack up a lot of miles driving the same routes over and over again, they say, but that may not actually prove very much about the quality of its technology. Uber's deadly car crash is a case in point: at the time of the crash, Uber was second only to Waymo in testing miles, but its technology was deeply flawed.

Enlarge / "Mind over matter, Dr. Angelo. Not a miracle—a fact." (credit: New Line Cinema)

This week, we’re serializing another episode of the After On Podcast here on Ars. Our guest is University of California, San Francisco neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, who runs one of the largest academic neuroscience labs on the West Coast. His main research goal is tuning video games to combat neurological aliments, including dementia and ADHD.

This may sound a bit like sci-fi (or wishful thinking!), but his work has been featured on the cover of Nature—which is widely considered to be one of the most prestigious academic journals in all of science. Short of a Nobel, peer validation doesn’t get much stronger than that.

We’ll run this interview in three installments. You can access today’s via our embedded audio player or by reading the accompanying transcript (both of which are below).

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai speaking at a press conference on October 1, 2018 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Mark Wilson )

The Federal Communications Commission is changing the rules for an upcoming spectrum auction in a way that will make it harder for small carriers to buy spectrum for deploying broadband.

The change—requested by T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon—will help the big carriers deploy nationwide 5G networks, according to Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal. But the change will also make it harder for small companies to buy spectrum that could be used to fill broadband gaps in rural areas.

In 2015, the Obama-era FCC set aside spectrum between 3550MHz and 3700MHz for a new Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) and ruled that 10MHz licenses would be auctioned off in individual Census tracts, which are small areas containing between 1,200 and 8,000 people each. Selling spectrum licenses in such small areas was meant to give small companies a shot at buying spectrum and deploying wireless broadband in underserved areas.

(credit: Aurich x Getty)

A lot of things have changed since 2006, when George W. Bush was president, New Super Mario Bros. was actually new, and most people knew "Twitter" as just a sound that birds made. One thing that hasn't changed, though, is the PlayStation Network ID you chose when you got a brand new PS3 that year—or any time in the past 12 years for that matter. That's because Sony has never offered the option to change that PSN username, despite over a decade of frequent requests from users embarrassed over youthful name choices like "XxX_BluntMaster69_XxX."

Finally, after months of hints and rumors, Sony has officially announced that the option to change your PSN Online ID is currently being tested and will roll out to all PlayStation users in "early 2019" (with earlier testing for members of the PlayStation Preview Program).

Users will get one free name change, but subsequent name changes will cost $9.99 per (or $4.99 for PlayStation Plus members). That small cost is meant to discourage scammers and griefers from constantly changing their account name for the purposes of harassment.