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The Falcon 9 rocket sliced a dazzling arc through the early morning Florida sky on Friday. (credit: SpaceX)

NASA’s legendary flight director Gene Kranz entitled his memoir Failure is Not an Option, referring to his days in mission control from the Mercury missions through the Apollo program. That mindset helped Kranz and teams of engineers at Johnson Space Center heroically return the crew of Apollo 13 safely home. But there is a belief among some that, since the heady Apollo days, such an attitude has made NASA’s managers too timid, and too risk averse.

More than a decade ago, even before the failure of his first Falcon 1 rocket, Elon Musk had already made it clear he did not adhere to this belief. During an interview for a 2005 article in Fast Company, the founder of SpaceX gave what has become one of his most enduring quotes: "There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA,” Musk said. “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

That attitude was on full display early Friday morning when a Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral along the Florida coast, beneath a black sky full of stars. As the rocket thundered upward, back on Earth, a few hundred miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, a barge about the size of a football field waited to catch it. But this would be no easy grab.

Microsoft has released the latest edition of its twice-annual Security Intelligence Report, its survey of the security landscape and threats around the world. The survey has a ton of data about what malware is infecting people, which parts of the world are seeing more attacks, and more.

For the first time, this report includes data that Microsoft has collected from its cloud operations. Azure Active Directory, handling logins for corporate Office 365 customers, has some 550 million users across 8.24 million customers and handles 1.3 billion logins a day. The Microsoft Account system used for consumer products handles more than 13 million logins per day.

This generates a ton of data, and Microsoft uses this data in machine learning systems to build models of what normal user behavior looks like and detect anomalies. Capabilities like this are used in the new Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, and today's SIR gives some quantification to them.

We're not sure that Nintendo NX will go with this EXACT advertising campaign, but, hey, why not? This week's chip-based game rumors would have to fall into place, at any rate. (credit: FunnyShirts.org)

When Nintendo finally stopped producing cartridges for home consoles in 2001, the games industry breathed a sigh of relief. Finally! Nintendo was waking up to a modern era, one in which plummeting media prices and rising memory capacities made old cartridges look obsolete.

Now, Nintendo is in a peculiar position—one in which it may not only return to chip-based media for its upcoming "NX" home system's software, but also one in which doing so may look like a good move.

The savvy reporters at British media-reporting site Screen Critics were first to notice a major financial report from Macronix, a Japanese company that has provided memory-related chips to consoles as far back as the N64. Macronix had already commented on serving as a chip supplier of some sort for Nintendo NX in January of this year, but in speaking about its current fiscal year (which, for Japanese companies, ends in March 2017), the company spoke about higher expectations for its "NOR Flash" business linked to the launch of the new Nintendo hardware.

(credit: Flickr/ecig click)

The US Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday that it has extended its authority and will now regulate electronic cigarettes, hookah tobacco, cigars, and other tobacco products under the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act.

The regulatory move, first proposed in 2014, is largely aimed at protecting kids from tobacco and nicotine products. The result is that e-cigs and the other products will now be subject to the same federal regulations as regular cigarettes. These regulations include some relatively uncontroversial rules such as a ban on selling e-cigs to minors (which some states have already done), requiring a photo ID to buy e-cigs, not selling e-cigs out of vending machines, and a ban on free e-cig samples.

But the regulations also require that e-cigarette manufactures register with the agency and put any new devices through a pre-market regulatory approval process. By “new,” the FDA means any novel devices put on the market after February 15, 2007. Devices released before then will be grandfathered into the regulations. However, in the relatively young e-cig market, the vast majority of current products were introduced after 2007 and will be subject to the approval process.