Month: June 2023

Enlarge / Getting all these games to be officially under the Microsoft banner (rather than just visually, as seen here) will take a while longer, at the very least. (credit: Microsoft)

A federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order blocking Microsoft's long-planned acquisition of Activision, pending hearings on the preliminary injunction being sought by the Federal Trade Commission in the case.

The temporary order issued by District Court Judge Jacqueline Corley doesn't do much to suggest which way the court is leaning on the merits of the FTC's case. A Microsoft spokesperson even acknowledged to the Associated Press that "a temporary restraining order makes sense until we can receive a decision from the Court, which is moving swiftly."

The order "maintain[s] the status quo," as Judge Corley puts it, by preventing Microsoft and Activision from closing their deal while a more permanent decision on the injunction is pending. And while Microsoft and Activision have said in the past that they will wait for the regulatory process to finish before completing their proposed deal, the FTC told Yahoo Finance that they sought the restraining order based on "public reporting that Microsoft and Activision Blizzard are considering closing their deal imminently."

Enlarge / A Hubble image of a pair of colliding galaxies, with a satellite trail running through it. (credit: Space Telescope Science Institute; NASA)

Throngs of satellites are streaking across the Hubble Space Telescope’s field of view, leaving what look like scratch marks on space photos and hindering scientists’ work. Teeming swarms of these satellites, which reflect sunlight and mimic astronomical objects, threaten to gradually transform the night sky and affect how astronomy can be done.

“We see these satellite trails in Hubble data, and really in all astronomical data, and they’re a bit of a nuisance,” said David Stark, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, speaking last week at the American Astronomical Society conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In fact, he said, his team used a new detection method to measure that the rate of satellite trails is doubling. But Stark was presenting his team’s idea for a Band-Aid fix: new software they described in a recent report that is five to 10 times more sensitive at finding trails than previous software, and then masking them out. “It’s particularly good at finding satellite trails that can be missed by eye,” he said.