Month: October 2023

Enlarge / Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, in June, arriving to court in San Francisco to testify in the Federal Trade Commission's suit to stop Microsoft's acquisition of the company Kotick has led for 33 years. (credit: Getty Images)

Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, emailed employees after news of Microsoft's successful $69 billion acquisition to say that he was "fully committed to helping with the transition" and that he would stay on as CEO through the end of 2023.

Kotick's statement left some ambiguity about his plans for 2024, but Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reports that on January 1, Kotick will depart. It's "a massive change for the video game industry," Schreier writes, which seems almost restrained, given Kotick's longevity and recent history. Several employees Schreier spoke to are "very excited for this deal to go through," specifically to see leadership change.

Kotick, who has led Activision for more than 30 years and orchestrated its merger with Blizzard, had considered stepping down in late 2021. Following a lawsuit from the state of California alleging a "frat boy culture" rife with pay disparity and sexual harassment, a Wall Street Journal report alleged that Kotick failed to act on hundreds of abuse allegations within the company and also kept the company's board of directors in the dark. Activision was also sued by its shareholders and pressured by state treasurers over its secrecy and responses regarding the California lawsuit. All of this led to an employee walkout and calls for Kotick's resignation.

Enlarge / The Hemenway Harbor Marina at Lake Mead, the country's largest man-made water reservoir, formed by Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in the Southwestern United States, as viewed from Boulder Beach on August 14, 2023. The Lake Mead, a national recreation area, located within the states of Nevada and Arizona 24 miles east of the Las Vegas Strip, serves water to the states of Arizona, California, Utah, Colorado, and Nevada, as well as parts of Mexico, providing fresh water to nearly 20 million people and large swaths of farmland. (credit: George Rose/Getty Images)

It’s been one of the wettest years in California since records began. From October 2022 to March 2023, the state was blasted by 31 atmospheric rivers—colossal bands of water vapor that form above the Pacific and become firehoses when they reach the West Coast. What surprised climate scientists wasn’t the number of storms, but their strength and rat-a-tat frequency. The downpours shocked a water system that had just experienced the driest three years in recorded state history, causing floods, mass evacuations, and at least 22 deaths.

Swinging between wet and dry extremes is typical for California, but last winter’s rain, potentially intensified by climate change, was almost unmanageable. Add to that the arrival of El Niño, and more extreme weather looks likely for the state. This is going to make life very difficult for the dam operators tasked with capturing and controlling much of the state’s water.

Like most of the world’s 58,700 large dams, those in California were built for yesterday’s more stable climate patterns. But as climate change taxes the world’s water systems—affecting rainfall, snowmelt, and evaporation—it’s getting tough to predict how much water gets to a dam, and when. Dams are increasingly either water-starved, unable to maintain supplies of power and water for their communities, or overwhelmed and forced to release more water than desired—risking flooding downstream.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Lukas Schulze)

At least 14 people in Utah have been sickened with a serious gastrointestinal infection after drinking "raw," unpasteurized milk, the Salt Lake County Health Department reported this week.

Raw milk outbreaks are not uncommon in Utah, which has some of the more permissive laws regarding the sale and distribution of unpasteurized milk in the country—and an unenviable record of outbreaks. Retail sales of raw milk are legal in Utah and, in 2015, the state passed a law expressly allowing herd-share programs. In these programs people pay for a share of an animal or herd and are thereby entitled to a portion of the unpasteurized milk produced.

In a 2022 study, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Utah had the largest number of single-state raw milk outbreaks of any other state between 2012 and 2019. In that timeframe, Utah saw 14 outbreaks. The next-closest state was Pennsylvania, with nine outbreaks.

Enlarge / The hood is detachable. (credit: Acer)

Acer is expanding its series of glasses-free 3D products with a new 4K monitor. The 27-inch monitor announced Thursday differs from Acer's previous 3D designs with its desktop size and introduction of Acer's headphones-free spatial audio feature.

Like other glasses-free products, Acer's SpatialLabs View Pro 27 uses a lenticular lens and eye-tracking with an infrared (IR) camera to present a 3D view to users, without the clunky 3D glasses associated with yesterday's abandoned 3D TVs. Acer claims its eye-tracking infrared camera has 1280×480 resolution and runs at 60 frames per second. Eye-tracking purportedly works with indoor lighting as low as 10 lux. Only one person can experience 3D at a time, though.

Acer hasn't specified how close you have to be to use the monitor's 3D functions yet but says it works with up to 11.8-inch (30cm) movements across the X-axis or up and down the Y-axis, as well as 19.7-106.3 inches (50 to 270cm) across the Z-axis (or up to 59.1 inches/150cm with low lighting).

Enlarge / Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried arrives for a bail hearing at US District Court on August 11, 2023, in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Michael Santiago )

Over three days of testimony in Sam Bankman-Fried's criminal trial, Caroline Ellison provided revealing glimpses from the years in which she was SBF's on-and-off girlfriend and one of his top executives.

Ellison's testimony described Bankman-Fried's belief that he could become US president, and his belief that his hair "was an important part of FTX's narrative and image." She offered details on a failed attempt to use prostitutes' identities to unlock funds frozen by the Chinese government, and on Bankman-Fried's habit of describing hypothetical coin flips in which everything—even the fate of the whole world—would be put at risk.

She also described how Bankman-Fried had a "utilitarian" philosophy in which rules like "don't lie" and "don't steal" did not fit into his moral framework.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Benj Edwards)

On Thursday, Google announced that it plans to defend users of its generative AI systems on Google Cloud and Workspace platforms against intellectual property violation claims, reports Reuters. The move follows similar commitments by Microsoft and Adobe, but Google claims its approach is more comprehensive, covering both the use of copyrighted works for training AI and the output generated by the systems.

"The generated output indemnity means that you can use content generated with a range of our products knowing Google will indemnify you for third-party IP claims, including copyright," Google writes in its announcement post.

Specifically, the new policy will cover software like its Vertex AI development platform and Duet AI system, which are used for generating text and images in Google Workspace and Cloud programs. Notably, the Google announcement did not mention Bard, Google's more well-known generative AI chatbot.

Enlarge / NASA's Space Launch System rocket is seen on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in April 2022. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

In recent years NASA has acknowledged that its large Space Launch System rocket is unaffordable and has sought to bring its costs down to a more reasonable level. The most recent estimate is that it costs $2.2 billion to build a single SLS rocket, and this does not include add-ons such as ground systems, integration, a payload, and more.

Broadly speaking, NASA's cost-reduction plan is to transfer responsibility for production of the rocket to a new company co-owned by Boeing and Northrop Grumman, who are key contractors for the rocket. This company, "Deep Space Transport," would then build the rockets and sell them to NASA. The space agency has said that this services-based model could reduce the cost of the rocket by as much as 50 percent.

However, in a damning new report, NASA's own inspector general, Paul Martin, says that is not going to happen. Rather, Martin writes, the cost of building the rocket is actually likely to increase.

Enlarge / Aerial photo taken at night shows the TSMC plant area in Nanjing, Jiangsu province. (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

The US Commerce Department announced today that key foreign chipmakers can continue receiving critical US chipmaking tools at China-based plants, Reuters reported.

This decision extends special authorizations that were granted to foreign chipmakers—including South Korea's SK Hynix and Samsung, as well as the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC)—after the Biden administration curbed shipments of advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to China last October.

Those export controls were intended to slow down China's rapid advancement of AI and military technologies, but the new rules also ended up negatively impacting US chip production. To overcome those inadvertent impacts on US chip supplies, the Biden administration granted limited special authorizations to allow some chipmakers to continue shipping equipment into China. Now, those chipmakers will be able to continue operating Chinese plants "without the headache of applying for US licenses," Reuters reported.