Month: October 2020

Enlarge / Patti Grace Smith was an important figure in the commercial space industry. (credit: Patti Grace Smith Fellowship)

Alvin Drew remembers becoming entranced with airplanes a few months before his fifth birthday. In the fall of 1967, he went to the airport in Baltimore to see his father off on a business trip. In those simpler times, he recalls walking outside to watch the takeoff from a designated area on the runway.

Four-year-olds are into all things big and loud, and seeing an airplane come racing down the runway, popping a wheelie, and then taking off was just about the coolest thing he could imagine. His mom and grandmother, both educators, noted his interest and bought him model airplanes. This nurtured a budding interest in flying and later becoming an astronaut.

"They saw a smoldering fire of curiosity inside me," Drew said. "They went out and threw as much gasoline on the fire as possible."

Enlarge / The United States Capitol Building, the seat of Congress, on the National Mall in Washington, DC. (credit: Omar Chatriwala | Getty Images)

Last June, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law began an in-depth investigation into four major firms—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. The subcommittee wanted to answer one key question: did Big Tech get big playing by the rules, or does it cheat to stay at the top? After 16 months of hearings, research, and analysis, the panel's findings are out... and the results look really bad for every company involved.

The tech sector does indeed suffer from abuses of "monopoly power," the subcommittee concluded in the mammoth 450-page report (PDF) published late yesterday afternoon.

"As they exist today, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook each possess significant market power over large swaths of our economy. In recent years, each company has expanded and exploited their power of the marketplace in anticompetitive ways," Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and antitrust subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-R.I.) said in a joint statement. "Our investigation leaves no doubt that there is a clear and compelling need for Congress and the antitrust enforcement agencies to take action that restores competition, improves innovation, and safeguards our democracy."

Enlarge / 60 Starlink satellites stacked for launch at SpaceX facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX's Starlink broadband has been available in a limited beta for the past few months, and SpaceX has now launched enough satellites for a public beta that will be available to more customers. However, the newly launched satellites aren't in position yet, and SpaceX hasn't revealed an exact availability date.

After yesterday's launch of 60 Starlink satellites, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter that "Once these satellites reach their target position, we will be able to roll out a fairly wide public beta in northern US & hopefully southern Canada. Other countries to follow as soon as we receive regulatory approval."

Musk did not say when the satellites will reach their target position. SpaceX has over 700 satellites in orbit after yesterday's launch.

These sealed crates could hold nearly anything. (credit: Tomasz Stachura/ Baltictech/Handout via REUTERS)

A World War II shipwreck recently located off the coast of Poland may hold the dismantled pieces of the Amber Room, a Russian treasure looted by the Nazis and lost since 1945.

The wreck of the German steamship Karlsruhe lies 88 meters (290 feet) below the surface of the Baltic Sea and a few dozen kilometers north of the resort town of Ustka, Poland. It’s in excellent shape after 75 years on the bottom, according to the team of 10 divers from Baltictech who located the wreck in June and announced the find in early October.

“It is practically intact,” Baltictech diver Tomasz Stachura told the press in a statement.

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  In case you haven't already purchased enough copies of these trilogies, Warner Bros. has you covered. [credit: Warner Bros. / Aurich Lawson ]

Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, arguably the greatest home theater showcase outside of documentaries like Planet Earth, is finally coming to 4K UHD Blu-ray.

Details emerged late Monday via Den of Geek, whose Instagram account posted leaked images from Best Buy-exclusive listings for the trilogy's SteelBook version. While Best Buy store listings were soon found by enterprising fans, those were eventually taken down, but they were followed by nonexclusive versions at Amazon: $90 for the normal trilogy, spread across nine Blu-ray discs, or $140 for a "gift set" version, which collects all of the normal cases in a larger, book-like case that may or may not include a replica of the One Ring.

Whichever set you buy, you can expect both theatrical and extended cuts of each film in the set, along with "digital code" redemption options for both versions of each film. Should you be on the lookout for a 4K UHD Blu-ray player, all disc-based Xbox consoles since the Xbox One S (including the brand new Series X, but not the disc-less Series S) support the standard, while PS5 is the only PlayStation console to do so.