Month: July 2019

Enlarge / Eleven and the gang face down weird dangers yet again in the third season trailer. (credit: YouTube/Netflix)

If you were one of the many people confused and curious about Microsoft’s apparent time-traveling social media blitz last week, wonder no more. As several astute fans guessed, the retro throwback was part of a collaboration with Netflix in support of Stranger Things, which just released its third season. The show is set in the year 1985, the same year that Microsoft released Windows 1.0.

The partnership has three elements. The first follows up on the many tweets from Microsoft’s social media crew that the original iteration of the Windows software would be launching. Microsoft has launched a PC app called Windows 1.11, which uses some of the original programs to give a rough overview of some of the new season’s plot points. Uncover clues in Paint, play an ASCII dungeon crawler, and watch clips from the show very roughly as they might have looked on a computer of that era.

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  The original Microsoft Windows 1.0 gets a new look in the app. [credit: Microsoft ]

In addition to the app, Microsoft is taking its Netflix tie-in off the screen. The company is hosting a series of STEM-focused summer workshops at several of its Microsoft Store locations beginning July 20. There are two options for the Camp Know Where sessions. Rule the Arcade will teach game design and coding, and participants will create a playable video game. Strange-ify Your World is based on Microsoft’s mixed reality tools, with participants inventing their own tales of friendship and teamwork in a mini-movie. The final component of the tie-in is a prize package. It includes a collectible arcade cabinet themed on Stranger Things 3, a new Xbox One X, and a year-long membership to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

Enlarge / ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA - JULY 6, 2019: A Russian Navy officer by a grave during a funeral of the 14 Russian Navy officers killed by the July 1 fire on a deep-water research submersible in the Barents Sea, at the Serafimovskoye cemetery. (credit: Valentin Yegorshin/TASS/Getty Images)

On July 1, 14 Russian sailors—most of them senior officers with ranks equivalent to captain, commander, or lieutenant commander in the US Navy—died in an accident aboard a small nuclear-powered submarine designed for operations near or on the sea floor. The submarine Losharik (named after a Russian children's book character who is a horse made of juggling balls) was operating in the Barents Sea when the accident took place.

According to a Russian Navy statement published by TASS, the 14 "died in Russian territorial waters as a result of inhaling combustion products aboard a research submersible vehicle designated for studying the seafloor and the bottom of the World Ocean in the interests of the Russian Navy after a fire broke out during bathymetric measurements." The officers died while combating the fire.

In a statement delivered on July 3 from the Russian North Fleet's base in Severomorsk, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that three crew members and a civilian aboard the sub survived the disaster. The crew members who died, he said, "acted heroically in the critical situation. They evacuated a civilian expert from the compartment that was engulfed by fire and shut the door to prevent the fire from spreading further and fought for the ship's survival until the end."

Enlarge / A boy at school. (credit: Getty | Florian Gaertner )

Anti-vaccine advocates in New York are encouraging parents to homeschool their children rather than protect them from serious diseases, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal.

The move by New York anti-vaccine groups comes just weeks after state lawmakers eliminated exemptions that allowed parents to opt their children out of standard school vaccination requirements on the basis of religious beliefs. Very few religions actually have objections to vaccinations, and the ones that do tend to have relatively few followers. But many parents who reject vaccines based on falsehoods and misinformation about their safety have claimed religious objections as a way to dodge immunization requirements.

As cases of measles in the United States have exploded in recent years—largely due to a small but loud band of anti-vaccine advocates misinforming parents—states are now cracking down on non-medical exemptions. New York, which has faced a massive and prolonged outbreak since last September, is the fifth state to eliminate religious exemptions. It joins California, Maine, Mississippi, and West Virginia. Overall, lawmakers in 26 states have recently introduced bills aimed at tightening rules on who can receive exemptions, according to The Hill.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Olena_T)

Amazon is seeking government permission to launch 3,236 broadband satellites that would cover nearly all of the United States and much of the rest of the world.

Amazon subsidiary Kuiper Systems filed its application with the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday last week, saying it intends to cover all of the US except most of Alaska.

"The Kuiper System covers the area between 56°N and 56°S latitudes," the Amazon subsidiary told the FCC. "Accordingly, customers throughout [the] continental US, Hawaii, and all US territories will have access to Kuiper System services. So too will customers in many other countries within the coverage area. The Kuiper System will not provide FSS [fixed-satellite service] in the majority of Alaska, however, because the state's high latitude is outside of the coverage area."

MERRITT ISLAND, Florida—The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes space as "really big." Kennedy Space Center (KSC) might be peanuts compared to space but, for human-sized visitors, it's pretty big. Located on Florida's Atlantic coast, an hour's drive east of Orlando's tourist spots, KSC has been NASA's site of choice for sending people into space since the 1960s. Covering the northern half of Merritt Island, its 219 square miles are studded with launch complexes surrounded by semitropical nature. Last week, Ars braved KSC's heat, rain, and crowds to watch Atlantis, and the 30-year Space Shuttle program, head into space for the final time.

Launching rockets over the ocean has quite a few advantages, but it's also subject to the capricious weather patterns of the Atlantic. Getting something into a specific orbit is more complicated than just kicking the tires and lighting the fires; each day only has a discrete launch window of a few minutes. If it's raining at the launch site, flight path, or at the various emergency landing sites in France and Spain during that time, no one's going to space that day. This makes attending a launch somewhat fraught: the weather doesn't care about anyone's plans, plane tickets, hotel reservations, or work schedule.

Driving to KSC, things did not look promising. NASA scheduled the launch for Friday, July 8th at 11:26 am, with successive launch windows on Saturday and Sunday. By Wednesday afternoon, the 45th Weather Squadron was predicting a 70 percent chance of delay. To make matters worse, if Friday did have to be scrubbed, Sunday would probably be the next attempt, as NASA wanted to give its teams enough time to get home, rest, and get back again, a process that would be seriously complicated by the hundreds of thousands of expected visitors and the traffic jams they'd bring.

Enlarge / Completed customer orders are seen in their boxes, awaiting delivery, at the Amazon Fulfillment Centre on November 14, 2018, in Hemel Hempstead, England. (credit: Leon Neal | Getty Images)

Shoppers who end up stuck with a defective dud product sold by some fly-by-night third-party Amazon seller may finally have an avenue of recourse: a federal court has become the first to rule that Amazon can be held liable for what its "marketplace" vendors sell.

The US 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, in Philadelphia, issued an opinion (PDF) that said Amazon qualified as a "seller" under Pennsylvania state law, at least for the purposes of the suit. While Amazon argued that every item sold on its site could be traced to a specific vendor, the court said that Amazon "fails to account for the fact that... third-party vendors can communicate with the customer only through Amazon," which "enables third-party vendors to conceal themselves from the customer, leaving customers injured by defective products with no direct recourse."

Amazon in its most recent quarterly report said its sprawling third-party marketplace accounted for more than 18% of the entire company's sales, bringing in $11.14 billion in three months. Analysts expect third-party marketplace revenue to eclipse Amazon's own first-party sales this year. While that largely laissez-faire digital agora brings in bank for the company that hosts it, consumers for years have faced mounting challenges with recalled products, toxic goods, counterfeits, and complete crap.