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Enlarge / US President Joe Biden speaks in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, May 4, 2021. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

By July 4—two months from today—the Biden administration wants to have 70 percent of American adults vaccinated with at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and 160 million adults fully vaccinated.

Currently, over 147.5 million people have received at least one shot, which is 44 percent of the overall population and includes 56 percent of adults (people ages 18 and up). Over 105 million people are fully vaccinated, which is nearly 32 percent of the overall population and includes nearly 41 percent of adults.

The administration’s new goal would mean that close to 100 million shots would have to go out in the next 60 days or so, President Joe Biden said in an address Tuesday afternoon.

Enlarge / NASA's Kathy Lueders, left, and SpaceX's Hans Koenigsmann track the Demo-2 crew mission in 2020. SpaceX is helping to enable NASA to think less about transportation and more about exploration. (credit: NASA)

No NASA official would ever admit this in public, but the 2010s have been a frustrating decade for human spaceflight.

After the space shuttle retired in 2011, as most everyone knows, NASA had no way to get its astronauts into space. But the frustrations ran deeper. Even as the agency scrambled to launch into low Earth orbit, it was tasked with sending astronauts further afield into deep space—to the Moon and Mars. So NASA has spent seemingly forever developing "capabilities" to get there, and observers often felt like NASA was spinning its wheels. Agency officials frequently talked about going to the Moon and Mars, but that was all they did—talk.

Now, however, things are starting to change. We are still in early days, but there is increasing agreement at NASA about the need to focus less on transportation—the "how" of getting there—and more on what to do when astronauts get to their destinations. This is because, as the transportation pieces fall in line, NASA can think about actual exploration.

Netflix's former vice president of IT operations was convicted of taking bribes from technology vendors in exchange for awarding them contracts with Netflix, the US Department of Justice announced Friday. The former Netflix VP's illegal scheme forced colleagues to use a variety of products, including one that suffered from "severe" performance problems and another that Netflix employees objected to because they preferred a different product the company was already paying for, the DOJ said.

Michael Kail, the ex-Netflix executive, was convicted by a federal jury of wire fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering. He used his position at Netflix to approve contracts for vendors that gave him bribes and kickbacks, the DOJ announcement said:

As Netflix's Vice President of IT Operations, Kail approved the contracts to purchase IT products and services from smaller outside vendor companies and authorized their payments. The evidence demonstrated that Kail accepted bribes in 'kickbacks' from nine tech companies providing products or services to Netflix. In exchange, Kail approved millions of dollars in contracts for goods and services to be provided to Netflix. Kail ultimately received over $500,000 and stock options from these outside companies. He used his kickback payments to pay personal expenses and to buy a home in Los Gatos, California, in the name of a family trust.

"Michael Kail wielded immense power to approve valuable Netflix contracts with small tech vendors, and he rigged that process to unlock a stream of cash and stock kickbacks to himself," acting US Attorney Stephanie Hinds said.

Enlarge / What a difference a decade makes. Even though 2/3 of the data in the new normals is present in the previous ones, the last decade's still been hot enough to drag the temperatures upwards. (credit: NOAA)

On Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a set of data it terms the "US Climate Normals." Updated once a decade, the figures contained in the report are based on the past 30 years of weather records, and they provide a sense of what the typical weather is on a given day of the year in each of the US's states and territories.

As you might imagine given the recent global temperature records, these figures show widespread warming compared to the normals of even a decade ago. They also reveal that while much of the US is getting wetter with the changing climate, California and the Southwest are in the midst of a dramatic drying trend.

What’s normal, anyway?

As NOAA puts it, you're most likely to come across its climate normals on a weather forecast when the projected conditions are compared to the ones typical for that location and time of year. The normals provide information on what's typical.

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  In 2019, EGS saw a series of daily user spikes surrounding the release of new free games. [credit: Epic v. Apple court filing ]

Last month, a filing in the Epic versus Apple court case showed the public just how much money Epic has been throwing at free games and exclusive "guarantees" to establish a market foothold for the Epic Games Store. Now, a new filing in the case gives a detailed breakdown on how that money was spent over the first 11 months of the Epic Games Store's existence (through October 2019).

While this version of Epic's Review of Performance and Strategy is a bit dated now, it still gives the clearest public indication yet of how Epic sees huge upfront spending on free and exclusive games as key to attracting new users to EGS. Epic hopes that, in turn, will help eventually make EGS a self-sustaining, profitable storefront with a significant share of the PC gaming market.

How to make money with free games

All told, in the first 10 months of EGS' existence (through September 2019), the filing shows Epic spent roughly $11.6 million to distribute just over 104 million free copies of 42 different titles. The "buyout price" paid from Epic to the publisher for each individual title varied, but the middle half of titles (25th to 75th percentile) cost $80,000 to $350,000 each. Two of the free games in the bunch were worth at least $1 million to Epic—Mutant Year Zero ($1M) and Subnautica ($1.4M)—while offering free copies of the three collected Batman: Arkham games cost Epic $1.5M total.

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Since 2018, an almost endless series of attacks broadly known as Spectre has kept Intel and AMD scrambling to develop defenses to mitigate vulnerabilities that allow malware to pluck passwords and other sensitive information directly out of silicon. Now, researchers say they’ve devised a new attack that breaks most—if not all—of those on-chip defenses.

Spectre got its name for its abuse of speculative execution, a feature in virtually all modern CPUs that predicts the future instructions the CPUs might receive and then follows a path that the instructions are likely to follow. By using code that forces a CPU to execute instructions along the wrong path, Spectre can extract confidential data that would have been accessed had the CPU continued down that wrong path. These exploits are known as transient executions.

“Dangerous implications”

Since Spectre was first described in 2018, new variants have surfaced almost every month. In many cases, the new variants have required chipmakers to develop new or augmented defenses to mitigate the attacks.