Apple is reinvesting in gaming with advanced Mac hardware, improvements to Apple silicon, and gaming-focused software, aiming not to repeat its past mistakes and capture a larger share of the gaming market. In an article for Inverse, Raymond Wong provides an in-depth overview of this endeavor, including commentary from Apple's marketing managers Gordon Keppel, Leland Martin, and Doug Brooks. Here's an excerpt from the report: Gaming on the Mac in the 1990s until 2020, when Apple made a big shift to its own custom silicon, could be boiled down to this: Apple was in a hardware arms race with the PC that it couldn't win. Mac gamers were hopeful that the switch from PowerPC to Intel CPUs starting in 2005 would turn things around, but it didn't because by then, GPUs started becoming the more important hardware component for running 3D games, and the Mac's support for third-party GPUs could only be described as lackluster. Fast forward to 2023, and Apple has a renewed interest in gaming on the Mac, the likes of which it hasn't shown in the last 25 years. "Apple silicon has changed all that," Keppel tells Inverse. "Now, every Mac that ships with Apple silicon can play AAA games pretty fantastically. Apple silicon has been transformative of our mainstream systems that got tremendous boosts in graphics with M1, M2, and now with M3."

Ask any gadget reviewer (including myself) and they will tell you Keppel isn't just drinking the Kool-Aid because Apple pays him to. Macs with Apple silicon really are performant computers that can play some of the latest PC and console games. In three generations of desktop-class chip design, Apple has created a platform with "tens of millions of Apple silicon Macs," according to Keppel. That's tens of millions of Macs with monstrous CPU and GPU capabilities for running graphics-intensive games. Apple's upgrades to the GPUs on its silicon are especially impressive. The latest Apple silicon, the M3 family of chips, supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and mesh shading, features that only a few years ago didn't seem like they would ever be a priority, let alone ones that are built into the entire spectrum of MacBook Pros.

The "magic" of Apple silicon isn't just performance, says Leland Martin, an Apple software marketing manager. Whereas Apple's fallout with game developers on the Mac previously came down to not supporting specific computer hardware, Martin says Apple silicon started fresh with a unified hardware platform that not only makes it easier for developers to create Mac games for, but will allow for those games to run on other Apple devices. "If you look at the Mac lineup just a few years ago, there was a mix of both integrated and discrete GPUs," Martin says. "That can add complexity when you're developing games. Because you have multiple different hardware permutations to consider. Today, we've effectively eliminated that completely with Apple silicon, creating a unified gaming platform now across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Once a game is designed for one platform, it's a straightforward process to bring it to the other two. We're seeing this play out with games like Resident Evil Village that launched first [on Mac] followed by iPhone and iPad."

"Gaming was fundamentally part of the Apple silicon design,â Doug Brooks, also on the Mac product marketing team, tells Inverse. "Before a chip even exists, gaming is fundamentally incorporated during those early planning stages and then throughout development. I think, big picture, when we design our chips, we really look at building balanced systems that provide great CPU, GPU, and memory performance. Of course, [games] need powerful GPUs, but they need all of those features, and our chips are designed to deliver on that goal. If you look at the chips that go in the latest consoles, they look a lot like that with integrated CPU, GPU, and memory." [...] "One thing we're excited about with this most recent launch of the M3 family of chips is that we're able to bring these powerful new technologies, Dynamic Caching, as well as ray-tracing and mesh shading across our entire line of chips," Brook adds. "We didn't start at the high end and trickle them down over time. We really wanted to bring that to as many customers as possible."

Microsoft is working on significant updates to its Surface Pro and Surface Laptop lines. According to Windows Central, new devices "will be announced in the spring and will be marketed as Microsoft's first true next-gen AI PCs." From the report: For the first time, both Surface Pro and Surface Laptop will be available in Intel and Arm flavors, and both will have next-gen NPU (neural processing unit) silicon. Sources are particularly excited about the Arm variants, which I understand will be powered by a custom version of Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Series chips. Internally, Microsoft is calling next-generation Arm devices powered by Qualcomm's new chips "CADMUS" PCs. These PCs are purpose-built for the next version of Windows, codenamed Hudson Valley, and will utilize many of the upcoming next-gen AI experiences Microsoft is building into the 2024 release of Windows. Specifically, Microsoft touts CADMUS PCs as being genuinely competitive with Apple Silicon, sporting similar battery life, performance, and security. The next Surface Pro and Surface Laptop are expected to be some of the first CADMUS PCs to ship next year in preparation for the Hudson Valley release coming later in 2024.

So, what's changing with the Surface Laptop 6? I'm told this new Surface Laptop will finally have an updated design with thinner bezels, rounded display corners, and more ports. This will be the first time that Microsoft's Surface Laptop line is getting a design refresh, which is well overdue. The Surface Laptop 6 will again be available in two sizes. However, I'm told the smaller model will have a slightly larger 13.8-inch display, up from 13.5 inches on the Surface Laptop 5. Sources say the larger model remains at 15-inches. I'm told Surface Laptop 6 will also have an expanded selection of ports, including two USB-C ports and one USB-A port, along with the magnetic Surface Connect charging port. Microsoft is also adding a haptic touchpad (likely with Sensel technology) and a dedicated Copilot button on the keyboard deck for quick access to Windows Copilot.

The next Surface Pro is also shaping into a big update, although not as drastic as the Surface Laptop 6. According to my sources, the most significant changes coming to Surface Pro 10 are mostly related to its display, which sources say is now brighter with support for HDR content, has a new anti-reflective coating to reduce glare, and now also sports rounded display corners. I've also heard that Microsoft is testing a version of Surface Pro 10 with a slightly lower-resolution 2160 x 1440 display, down from the 2880 x 1920 screen found on previous Surface Pro models. Sources say this lower-resolution panel is only being considered for lower-tier models, meaning the more expensive models will continue to ship with the higher-resolution display. Lastly, I also hear Microsoft is equipping the next Surface Pro with an NFC reader for commercial customers and a wider FoV webcam, which will be enhanced with Windows Studio Effects. It should also be available in new colors. I've also heard we may get an updated Type Cover accessory with a dedicated Copilot button for quick access to Windows Copilot.

Amazon is making plans to produce hydrogen fuel at its fulfillment centers. The retail behemoth partnered with hydrogen company Plug Power to install the first electrolyzer -- equipment that can split water molecules to produce hydrogen -- at a fulfillment center in Aurora, Colorado. From a report: The electrolyzer will make fuel for around 225 fork lift trucks at the site, although Plug says it has the capacity to fuel up to 400 hydrogen fuel cell-powered forklifts. This is the first time Amazon has tried to make its own hydrogen on site, and it's not likely to be the last. "On-site production will make the use of hydrogen even more energy efficient for certain locations and types of facilities," Asad Jafry, Amazon's director of global hydrogen economy, said in a press release announcing the installation of the first electrolyzer yesterday. "Hydrogen is an important tool in our efforts to decarbonize our operations by 2040."

[...] Hydrogen produces water vapor instead of greenhouse gas emissions during combustion, a trait that's made it more attractive to companies and governments working to meet climate goals. The big problem they need to tackle is cleaning up the process of making hydrogen in the first place. Today, most of it is made using fossil fuels, primarily through a reaction between steam and methane. The process releases planet-heating carbon dioxide. Methane leaks are another problem since methane -- also called natural gas -- is an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Plug tries to solve those problems by using electrolyzers to produce hydrogen. Instead of using methane, it uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. If that electricity is generated by renewable sources of energy like wind or solar, it's called green hydrogen.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: According to Modvion, the Swedish start-up that has just built the world's tallest wooden turbine tower, using wood for wind power is the future. "It's got great potential," Otto Lundman, the company's chief executive, says as we gaze upwards at the firm's brand new turbine, a short drive outside Gothenburg. It's 150m (492ft) to the tip of the highest blade and we are the first journalists to be invited to have a look inside. The 2 megawatt generator on top has just started supplying electricity to the Swedish grid, providing power for about 400 homes. The dream of Lundman and Modvion is to take the wood and wind much higher. On the horizon near the Modvion project, several very similar-looking turbines are turning. Steel, not wood, is the key material for them, as it is for almost all of the world's turbine towers. Strong and durable, steel has enabled huge turbines and wind farms to be constructed on land and at sea. But steel is not without its limitations, particularly for projects on land. As demand has grown for taller turbines that harvest stronger winds with larger generators, the diameter of the cylindrical steel towers to support them has had to grow too. In a world of road tunnels, bridges and roundabouts, many in the wind industry say getting those huge pieces of metal to turbine sites has become a real headache, in effect limiting how tall new steel turbines can be.

From the outside, there is little obvious difference between the Modvion wooden turbine and its steel cousins. Both have a thick white coating to protect them from the elements and blades made primarily from fiberglass attached to a generator, which produces electricity when it turns. It is only when we go inside the tower that the differences becomes clear. The walls have a curved raw wood finish, not unlike a sauna. The 105m (345ft) tower's strength comes from the 144 layers of laminated veneer lumber (LVL) that make its thick walls. By varying the grain of each of the 3mm-thick layers of spruce, Modvion says it has been able to control the wall's strength and flexibility. "It's our secret recipe," says company co-founder -- and former architect and boat builder -- David Olivegren, with a smile. [...] Lundman and Olivegren tell me their turbine's big selling point is that, by using wood and glue, towers can be built in smaller, more easily transported modules. That will make it much easier to build really tall towers, they say, and to take the pieces to challenging locations.

However, Dr Maximilian Schnippering, head of sustainability at Siemens Gamesa -- one of the worlds largest turbine manufacturers -- says more pieces are likely to mean more trucks, more people and more time to complete the installation. He considers the modular system "an advantage" and that wooden towers can "nicely complement" steel towers. [...] Though wind power is cheaper and cleaner than almost all other forms of electricity generation, making steel involves extremely hot furnaces and almost always the burning of fossil fuels. That means CO2 emissions -- the main driver of climate change. Modvion says using wood instead of steel eliminates the wind turbines' carbon footprint entirely, making them carbon negative. That's because the trees take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere when they are alive and, when they are chopped down, the carbon is stored in the wood. As long as the wood doesn't end up rotting or being burned, the carbon is not released. About 200 trees went into Modvion's turbine tower. They were the same species -- spruce -- that is used for Christmas trees and the company says they are farmed sustainably, meaning when they are harvested more are planted. Modvion hopes to build another even taller turbine soon with plans to open a facility that will produce 100 wooden modular turbines a year in 2027. "The industry is currently putting up 20,000 turbines a year," Lundman says. "Our ambition is that in 10 years time 10% of those turbines -- about 2,000 -- will be wooden."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: The 12VO power standard (PDF), developed by Intel, is designed to reduce the number of power cables needed to power a modern PC, ultimately reducing cost. While industry uptake of the standard has been slow, a new slew of products from MSI indicates that 12VO is gaining traction.

MSI is gearing up with two 12VO-compliant motherboards, covering both Intel and AMD platforms, and a 12VO Power Supply that it's releasing simultaneously: The Pro B650 12VO WiFi, Pro H610M 12VO, and MSI 12VO PSU power supply are all 'coming soon,' which presumably means they'll officially launch at CES 2024. HardwareLux got a pretty good look at MSI's offerings during its EHA (European Hardware Awards) tech tour, including the 'Project Zero' we covered earlier. One of the noticeable changes is the absence of a 24-pin ATX connector, as the ATX12VO connectors use only ten-pin connectors. The publications also saw a 12VO-compliant FSP power supply in a compact system with a thick graphics card.

A couple of years ago, we reported on FSP 650-watt and 750-watt SFX 12VO power supply. Apart from that, there is a 1x 6-pin ATX12VO termed 'extra board connector' according to its manual and a 1x 8-pin 12V power connector for the CPU. There are two smaller 4-pin connectors that will provide the 5V power needed for SATA drives. It is likely each of these connectors provides power to two SATA-based drives. Intel proposed the ATX12VO standard several years ago, but adoption has been slow until now. This standard is designed to provide 12v exclusively, completely removing a direct 3.3v and 5v supply. The success of the new standard will depend on the wide availability of the motherboard and power supplies.

An appeals court on Wednesday temporarily stopped the import ban on Apple's latest Apple Watches, allowing the company to continue selling the wearables. CNBC reports: Apple stopped selling its Series 9 and Ultra 2 watches last week in response to an International Trade Commission order in October that found the blood oxygen sensor in the devices had infringed on intellectual property from Masimo, a medical technology company that sells to hospitals. "The motion for an interim stay is granted to the extent that the Remedial Orders are temporarily stayed," a court filing Wednesday said.

On Monday, the Biden administration declined to pause the ITC ban. Apple filed the appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Tuesday. The company continues to seek a longer stay. The ITC will need to reply by Jan. 10. The stay means Apple may be able to sell the latest models of one of its most important products during the busiest time of the year. Apple Watch sales are reported as part of Apple's wearables business, which reported $39.8 billion in sales in Apple's fiscal 2023, which ended in September.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As Moore's Law slowed to a crawl, chips, particularly those used in AI and high-performance computing (HPC), have steadily gotten hotter. In 2023 we saw accelerators enter the kilowatt range with the arrival of Nvidia's GH200 Superchips. We've known these chips would be hot for a while now -- Nvidia has been teasing the CPU-GPU franken-chip for the better part of two years. What we didn't know until recently is how OEMs and systems builders would respond to such a power-dense part. Would most of the systems be liquid cooled? Or, would most stick to air cooling? How many of these accelerators would they try to cram into a single box, and how big would the box be?

Now that the first systems based on the GH200 make their way to market, it's become clear that form factor is very much being dictated by power density than anything else. It essentially boils down to how much surface area you have to dissipate the heat. Dig through the systems available today from Supermicro, Gigabyte, QCT, Pegatron, HPE, and others and you'll quickly notice a trend. Up to about 500 W per rack unit (RU) -- 1 kW in the case of Supermicro's MGX ARS-111GL-NHR -- these systems are largely air cooled. While hot, it's still a manageable thermal load to dissipate, working out to about 21-24 kW per rack. That's well within the power delivery and thermal management capacity of modern datacenters, especially those making use of rear door heat exchangers.

However, this changes when system builders start cramming more than a kilowatt of accelerators into each chassis. At this point most of the OEM systems we looked at switched to direct liquid cooling. Gigabyte's H263-V11, for example, offers up to four GH200 nodes in a single 2U chassis. That's two kilowatts per rack unit. So while a system like Nvidia's air-cooled DGX H100 with its eight 700 W H100s and twin Sapphire Rapids CPUs has a higher TDP at 10.2 kW, it's actually less power dense at 1.2 kW/RU.

"What would you like OpenAI to build/fix in 2024?" the company's CEO asked on X this weekend.

But "Amid all the hysteria about ChatGPT and co, one thing is being missed," argues the Observer — "how energy-intensive the technology is." The current moral panic also means that a really important question is missing from public discourse: what would a world suffused with this technology do to the planet? Which is worrying because its environmental impact will, at best, be significant and, at worst, could be really problematic.

How come? Basically, because AI requires staggering amounts of computing power. And since computers require electricity, and the necessary GPUs (graphics processing units) run very hot (and therefore need cooling), the technology consumes electricity at a colossal rate. Which, in turn, means CO2 emissions on a large scale — about which the industry is extraordinarily coy, while simultaneously boasting about using offsets and other wheezes to mime carbon neutrality.

The implication is stark: the realisation of the industry's dream of "AI everywhere" (as Google's boss once put it) would bring about a world dependent on a technology that is not only flaky but also has a formidable — and growing — environmental footprint. Shouldn't we be paying more attention to this?
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

With everyone worrying about climate change, CNN shares a list of reasons to feel positive: The year 2023 is on track to see the biggest increase in renewable energy capacity to date, according to the International Energy Agency. China, the world's biggest climate polluter, has made lightning advances in renewables, with the country set to shatter its wind and solar target five years early. A report published in June found that China's solar capacity is now greater than the rest of the world's nations combined, in a surge described by the report's author, Global Energy Monitor, as "jaw-dropping...."

The popularity of electric vehicles has surged this year, with American sales at an all-time high. People in China and Europe are snapping up EVs in large numbers as well... Americans purchased 1 million fully electric vehicles in 2023, an annual record, according to a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Electric vehicles accounted for about 8% of all new vehicles sales in the US during the first half of 2023, according to the report. In China, EVs accounted for 19% of all vehicle sales, and worldwide, they made up 15% of new passenger vehicle sales. EV sales in Europe were up 47% in the first nine months of 2023, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (EAMA)
Other positive developments from the article:

• "For more than six days straight, between October 31 to November 6, the nation of more than 10 million people relied solely on renewable energy sources — setting an exciting example for the rest of the world."

• "Deforestation in Brazil fell by 22.3% in the 12 months through July, according to data from the national government, as President Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva started to make progress on his pledge to rein in the rampant forest destruction that occurred under his predecessor..."

• "The Earth's ozone layer is on track to recover completely within decades, a UN-backed panel of experts announced in January, as ozone-depleting chemicals are phased out across the world."

Longtime Slashdot reader FudRucker quotes a report from Study Finds: Researchers from Northwestern University, Boston College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new synaptic transistor that works just like the human brain. This advanced device, capable of both processing and storing information simultaneously, marks a notable shift from traditional machine-learning tasks to performing associative learning -- similar to higher-level human cognition. This study introduces a device that operates effectively at room temperatures, a notable improvement over previous brain-like computing devices that required extremely cold conditions to keep their circuits from overheating. With its fast operation, low energy consumption, and ability to retain information without power, the new transistor is well-suited for real-world applications.

"The brain has a fundamentally different architecture than a digital computer," says study co-author Mark Hersam, the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering, in a university release. "In a digital computer, data move back and forth between a microprocessor and memory, which consumes a lot of energy and creates a bottleneck when attempting to perform multiple tasks at the same time. On the other hand, in the brain, memory and information processing are co-located and fully integrated, resulting in orders of magnitude higher energy efficiency. Our synaptic transistor similarly achieves concurrent memory and information processing functionality to more faithfully mimic the brain."

Hersam and his team employed a novel strategy involving moire patterns, a type of geometric design formed when two patterns are overlaid. By stacking two-dimensional materials like bilayer graphene and hexagonal boron nitride and twisting them to form a moire pattern, they could manipulate the electronic properties of the graphene layers. This manipulation allowed for the creation of a synaptic transistor with enhanced neuromorphic functionality at room temperature. The device's testing involved training it to recognize patterns and similarities, a form of associative learning. For instance, if trained to identify a pattern like "000," the transistor could distinguish that "111" is more similar to "000" than "101," demonstrating a higher level of cognitive function. This ability to process complex and imperfect inputs has significant implications for real-world AI applications, such as improving the reliability of self-driving vehicles in challenging conditions. The study has been published in the journal Nature.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel writes: With patches pending for creating an Acer Aspire 1 embedded controller driver, this Qualcomm Snapdragon powered ARM laptop has "almost full support" with the upstream Linux kernel. The Acer Aspire 1 (A114-61) is an aging ARM laptop design built on the Snapdragon 7c Gen1. It's no longer the latest and greatest with it being a two year old device, but for those wanting a low-power and long-battery-life laptop, the Acer Aspire 1 still has some potential for Linux enthusiasts.

Over the course of this year this eight-core ARM laptop has been seeing work on mainline Linux kernel support. Since Linux 6.5 much of that support has been in place while some bits remain. Sent out recently was this patch series creating an embedded controller (EC) driver for the Acer Aspire 1. This EC driver gets battery and charger monitoring working along with USB Type-C DP Alt Mode HPD monitoring, lid status detection, and some keyboard configuration. The EC functionality on the Acer Aspire 1 is implemented in ACPI but sadly ACPI cant be used to boot Linux on these Qualcomm devices -- thus leading to this new "acer-aspire1-ec" driver being created.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The Biden administration released its highly anticipated proposal for doling out billions of dollars in tax credits to hydrogen producers Friday, in a massive effort to build out an industry that some hope can be a cleaner alternative to fossil fueled power. The U.S. credit is the most generous in the world for hydrogen production, Jesse Jenkins, a professor at Princeton University who has analyzed the U.S. climate law, said last week. The proposal -- which is part of Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act passed last year -- outlines a tiered system to determine which hydrogen producers get the most credits, with cleaner energy projects receiving more, and smaller, but still meaningful credits going to those that use fossil fuel to produce hydrogen.

Administration officials estimate the hydrogen production credits will deliver $140 billion in revenue and 700,000 jobs by 2030 -- and will help the U.S. produce 50 million metric tons of hydrogen by 2050. "That's equivalent to the amount of energy currently used by every bus, every plane, every train and every ship in the US combined," Energy Deputy Secretary David M. Turk said on a Thursday call with reporters to preview the proposal. [...] As part of the administration's proposal, firms that produce cleaner hydrogen and meet prevailing wage and registered apprenticeship requirements stand to qualify for a large incentive at $3 per kilogram of hydrogen. Firms that produce hydrogen using fossil fuels get less. The credit ranges from $.60 to $3 per kilo, depending on whole lifecycle emissions.

One contentious issue in the proposal was how to deal with the fact that clean, electrolyzer hydrogen draws tremendous amounts of electricity. Few want that to mean that more coal or natural gas-fired power plants run extra hours. The guidance addresses this by calling for producers to document their electricity usage through "energy attribute certificates" -- which will help determine the credits they qualify for. Rachel Fakhry, policy director for emerging technologies at the Natural Resources Defense Council called the proposal "a win for the climate, U.S. consumers, and the budding U.S. hydrogen industry." The Clean Air Task Force likewise called the proposal "an excellent step toward developing a credible clean hydrogen market in the United States."

The next version of Android could give you an estimate of your battery's remaining capacity, which naturally degrades over time. "Android 14 laid the initial groundwork for the OS to track battery health information, but Android 15 could actually bring that information in front of users," reports Android Authority. It could also tell you whether your device's battery has been replaced. From the report: The manufacture date and cycle count aren't the only battery-related statistics that Android 14 exposes to apps through new APIs, though. Other battery health details like the date of first use, charging policy, charging status, and state of health are also available. The state of health is particularly interesting because it's an estimate of the battery's current full charge capacity, expressed as a percentage relative to the battery's rated capacity. For example, if your Pixel 8 battery's state of health is measured at 90%, that means its remaining full charge capacity is estimated to be about 4118mAh (compared to the rated 4575mAh).

The Settings app currently doesn't show the battery state of health, but that's set to change in the future, as the latest version of the Settings Services app (an extension to the Settings app on Pixel and other devices) found within Android 14 QPR2 Beta 2 has a new "battery health" page that is set to show the state of health. [...] Strings within the APK suggest this page will show you the "estimated percentage of charge the battery can currently hold compared to when it was new" (i.e. the state of health) before and after "recalibration" of the battery. We don't have the exact details on what "recalibration" entails, but given that one string suggests the "process may take a few weeks," we're guessing that it's simply the system collecting data over a longer period to provide a more accurate estimate of the battery capacity. Meanwhile, the "initial battery health values" are "based on lab results" and hence "may vary from your actual battery state."

[...] We also learned that the Settings app itself will surface "tips" to the user when either the battery capacity is degraded or can't be detected, so the user doesn't have to manually check the "battery health" page. Lastly, we learned that Google is working on exposing more battery-related information to the OS, such as the part status and the serial number. [...] At the very least, we do know that Android will support reading the battery's part status and serial number, provided the battery exposes that information to the OS, and the vendor implements the new version of the Android health HAL. The health HAL is the software responsible for bridging the gap between the OS APIs that read battery/charging information (i.e. everything we talked about before) with the software that controls the battery/charging chips. Version 2.0 of the health HAL needs to be implemented to support all the new Android 14 battery health APIs like state of health, which is why so few devices support that right now.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch, written by Brian Heater: Back in mid-September, a pair of Massachusetts lawmakers introduced a bill "to ensure the responsible use of advanced robotic technologies." What that means in the simplest and most direct terms is legislation that would bar the manufacture, sale and use of weaponized robots. It's an interesting proposal for a number of reasons. The first is a general lack of U.S. state and national laws governing such growing concerns. It's one of those things that has felt like science fiction to such a degree that many lawmakers had no interest in pursuing it in a pragmatic manner. [...] Earlier this week, I spoke about the bill with Massachusetts state representative Lindsay Sabadosa, who filed it alongside Massachusetts state senator Michael Moore.

What is the status of the bill?
We're in an interesting position, because there are a lot of moving parts with the bill. The bill has had a hearing already, which is wonderful news. We're working with the committee on the language of the bill. They have had some questions about why different pieces were written as they were written. We're doing that technical review of the language now -- and also checking in with all stakeholders to make sure that everyone who needs to be at the table is at the table.

When you say "stakeholders" ...
Stakeholders are companies that produce robotics. The robot Spot, which Boston Dynamics produces, and other robots as well, are used by entities like Boston Police Department or the Massachusetts State Police. They might be used by the fire department. So, we're talking to those people to run through the bill, talk about what the changes are. For the most part, what we're hearing is that the bill doesn't really change a lot for those stakeholders. Really the bill is to prevent regular people from trying to weaponize robots, not to prevent the very good uses that the robots are currently employed for.

Does the bill apply to law enforcement as well?
We're not trying to stop law enforcement from using the robots. And what we've heard from law enforcement repeatedly is that they're often used to deescalate situations. They talk a lot about barricade situations or hostage situations. Not to be gruesome, but if people are still alive, if there are injuries, they say it often helps to deescalate, rather than sending in officers, which we know can often escalate the situation. So, no, we wouldn't change any of those uses. The legislation does ask that law enforcement get warrants for the use of robots if they're using them in place of when they would send in a police officer. That's pretty common already. Law enforcement has to do that if it's not an emergency situation. We're really just saying, "Please follow current protocol. And if you're going to use a robot instead of a human, let's make sure that protocol is still the standard."

I'm sure you've been following the stories out of places like San Francisco and Oakland, where there's an attempt to weaponize robots. Is that included in this?
We haven't had law enforcement weaponize robots, and no one has said, "We'd like to attach a gun to a robot" from law enforcement in Massachusetts. I think because of some of those past conversations there's been a desire to not go down that route. And I think that local communities would probably have a lot to say if the police started to do that. So, while the legislation doesn't outright ban that, we are not condoning it either. Representative Sabadosa said Boston Dynamics "sought us out" and is "leading the charge on this."

"I'm hopeful that we will be the first to get the legislation across the finish line, too," added Rep. Sabadosa. "We've gotten thank-you notes from companies, but we haven't gotten any pushback from them. And our goal is not to stifle innovation. I think there's lots of wonderful things that robots will be used for. [...]"

You can read the full interview here.

After producing a nuclear fusion reaction last year that released more energy than it used, scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (LLNL) say they have successfully replicated the process at least three times this year. "This marks another significant step in what could one day be an important solution to the global climate crisis, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels," reports CNN. The announcement appears in a December report (PDF) from the LLNL. From the report: After making their historic net energy gain last year, the next important step was to prove the process could be replicated. Brian Appelbe, a research fellow from the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, said the ability to replicate demonstrates the "robustness" of the process, showing it can be achieved even when conditions such as the laser or fuel pellet are varied. Each experiment also offers an opportunity to study the physics of ignition in detail, Appelbe told CNN. "This provides valuable information to the scientists in addressing the next challenge to be overcome: how to maximize the energy that can be obtained."

There are different ways of creating energy from fusion, but at NIF, scientists fire an array of nearly 200 lasers at a pellet of hydrogen fuel inside a diamond capsule the size of a peppercorn, itself inside a gold cylinder. The lasers heat up the cylinder's outside, creating a series of very fast explosions, generating large amounts of energy collected as heat. The energy produced in December 2022 was small -- it took around 2 megajoules to power the reaction, which released a total of 3.15 megajoules, enough to boil around 10 kettles of water. But it was sufficient to make it a successful ignition and to prove that laser fusion could create energy.

Since then, the scientists have done it several more times. On July 30, the NIF laser delivered a little over 2 megajoules to the target, which resulted in 3.88 megajoules of energy -- their highest yield achieved to date, according to the report. Two subsequent experiments in October also delivered net gains. "These results demonstrated NIF's ability to consistently produce fusion energy at multi-megajoule levels," the report said. There is still a very long way to go, however, until nuclear fusion reaches the scale needed to power electric grids and heating systems. The focus now is on building on the progress made and figuring out how to dramatically scale up fusion projects and significantly bring down costs.

"The Ministry of Justice is consulting on digitizing and then throwing away about 100 million paper originals of the last wills and testaments of British people dating back more than 150 years in an effort to save 4.5 million pounds a year," reports Robert Booth via The Guardian. Leading historians are calling these plans "sheer vandalism" and "insane." From the report: Ministers believe digitisation will speed up access to the papers, but the proposal has provoked a backlash among historians and archivists who took to X to decry it as "bananas" and "a seriously bad idea." The government is proposing to keep the originals of some wills of "famous people" -- likely including those of Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Diana, Princess of Wales -- but others would be destroyed after 25 years and only a digital copy would be kept. It is feared that wills of ordinary people, some of whom may become historically significant in the future, risk being lost.

Wills are considered essential documents, particularly for social historians and genealogists, as they capture what people considered important at the time and reveal unknown family links. The proposal comes amid growing concern at the fragility of digital archives, after a cyber-attack on the British Library left the online catalogue and digitized documents unavailable to users since late October. "We are advocates of digitization but not at the cost of destroying originals," says Natalie Pithers, interim co-chief executive of the Society of Genealogists. "In any digitization projects mistakes get made. We don't know what further information could be gained in the future from the original documents. There could be somebody in there who did something extraordinary."

Longtime Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: Microsoft has released a new software tool to remove printer software from HP that was installed without user permission or system need. A few weeks ago, users noticed that Windows Update installed HP printer software even if they did not have HP printers or printers at all. Affecting Windows 10 and 11, consumers reported that this update sometimes caused problems as it could rename their non-HP printers as HP printers causing some printing features to be inaccessible. Microsoft has not disclosed the root cause of the issue. The fix released by Microsoft requires users to download and run a dedicated troubleshooting tool available from Microsoft's support site. "There are four different versions of the troubleshooter, depending on whether you have the 32- or 64-bit version of an Arm or x86 version of Windows," notes Ars Technica. "Microsoft will also release an additional recommended troubleshooting tool 'in the coming weeks' that will fix the problem in Windows 11 upon a user's request without requiring the download of a separate tool."

A volcano in southwestern Iceland began erupting Monday, posing a risk to the nearby Svartsengi Power Plant and the town of Grindavik. "We are looking at a worst-case scenario," said Thorvaldur Thordarson, a volcanologist in Iceland. "The eruption appears big, and only about two kilometers from major infrastructure." The New York Times reports: Thousands of earthquakes had been detected in Iceland since late October, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office. In November, with homes and roads being damaged, the authorities declared a state of emergency and evacuated Grindavik, a town of more than 3,000 people near the volcano. More recently, the Meteorological Office warned of a "significant likelihood of a volcanic eruption in coming days."

Volcanic eruptions are not uncommon in Iceland, which has fewer than 400,000 residents and about 130 volcanoes. Since the 19th century, not a decade has gone by without one, Iceland's tourist website tells interested visitors. The occurrence of eruptions remains "entirely random." The country straddles two tectonic plates, which are themselves divided by an undersea mountain chain that oozes molten hot rock, or magma.

The current seismic activity has not affected one of Iceland's best-known volcanoes, Katla, which some scientists worry is due for an eruption. Katla has erupted five times since 1721, at intervals ranging from 34 to 78 years. The last major one was in 1918. Last month, Icelandic authorities started building defense walls around the geothermal power plant to protect it from lava flows. "Authorities said they were preparing to construct a large dyke designed to divert lava flows around the Svartsengi geothermal power plant, located just over 6 kilometers (4 miles) from Grindavik," reported Reuters in mid November.

"A spokesperson for HS Orka, operator of the power plant, said it supplies power to the entire country, although a disruption would not affect power supply to Reykjavik."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Apple said on Monday that it would pause sales of its flagship smartwatches online starting Thursday and at retail locations on Christmas Eve. Two months ago, Apple lost a patent case over the technology its smartwatches use to detect people's pulse rate. The company was ordered to stop selling the Apple Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2 after Christmas, which could set off a run on sales of the watches in the final week of holiday shopping. The move by Apple follows a ruling by the International Trade Commission in October that found several Apple Watches infringe on patents held by Masimo, a medical technology company in Irvine, Calif.

In court, Masimo detailed how Apple poached its top executives and more than a dozen other employees before later releasing a watch with pulse oximeter capabilities -- whichmeasures the percentage of oxygen that red blood cells carry from the lungs to the body -- that were patented by Masimo. To avoid a complete ban on sales, Apple had two months to cut a deal with Masimo to license its technology, or it could appeal to the Biden administration to reverse the ruling. But Joe Kiani, the chief executive of Masimo, said in an interview that Apple had not engaged in licensing negotiations. Instead, he said that Apple had appealed to President Biden to veto the I.T.C. ruling, which Mr. Kiani knows because the administration contacted Masimo about Apple's request. "They're trying to make the agency look like it's helping patent trolls," Mr. Kiani said of the I.T.C.

Mr. Kiani said that he was willing to sell Apple a chip that Masimo had designed to provide pulse oximeter readings on the Apple Watch. The chip is currently in a Masimo medical watch, called the W1, that is approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The device uses algorithms to process red and near-infrared light to determine how oxygen-rich is the blood in arteries. "If they don't want to use our chip, I'll work with them to make their product good," Mr. Kiani said. "Once it's good enough, I'm happy to give them a license." Apple introduced its first watch with pulse oximetry in 2020. It has included the technology, which it calls "blood oxygen," in subsequent models. But unlike Masimo's W1 device, Apple hasn't had its watches cleared by the F.D.A. for use as a medical device for pulse oximetry. "The Apple Watch accounts for nearly $20 billion of the company's $383.29 billion in annual sales," notes the NYT. The company is the largest smartwatch seller in the world, accounting for about a third of all smartwatch sales.

"For the past two weeks, I've been using a new camera to secretly snap photos and record videos of strangers in parks, on trains, inside stores and at restaurants," writes a reporter for the New York Times. They were testing the recently released $300 Ray-Ban Meta glasses — "I promise it was all in the name of journalism" — which also includes microphones (and speakers, for listening to audio).

They call the device "part of a broader ambition in Silicon Valley to shift computing away from smartphone and computer screens and toward our faces." Meta, Apple and Magic Leap have all been hyping mixed-reality headsets that use cameras to allow their software to interact with objects in the real world. On Tuesday, Zuckerberg posted a video on Instagram demonstrating how the smart glasses could use AI to scan a shirt and help him pick out a pair of matching pants. Wearable face computers, the companies say, could eventually change the way we live and work... While I was impressed with the comfortable, stylish design of the glasses, I felt bothered by the implications for our privacy...

To inform people that they are being photographed, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses include a tiny LED light embedded in the right frame to indicate when the device is recording. When a photo is snapped, it flashes momentarily. When a video is recording, it is continuously illuminated. As I shot 200 photos and videos with the glasses in public, including on BART trains, on hiking trails and in parks, no one looked at the LED light or confronted me about it. And why would they? It would be rude to comment on a stranger's glasses, let alone stare at them... [A] Meta spokesperson, said the company took privacy seriously and designed safety measures, including a tamper-detection technology, to prevent users from covering up the LED light with tape.
But another concern was how smart glasses might impact our ability to focus: Even when I wasn't using any of the features, I felt distracted while wearing them... I had problems concentrating while driving a car or riding a scooter. Not only was I constantly bracing myself for opportunities to shoot video, but the reflection from other car headlights emitted a harsh, blue strobe effect through the eyeglass lenses. Meta's safety manual for the Ray-Bans advises people to stay focused while driving, but it doesn't mention the glare from headlights. While doing work on a computer, the glasses felt unnecessary because there was rarely anything worth photographing at my desk, but a part of my mind constantly felt preoccupied by the possibility...

Ben Long, a photography teacher in San Francisco, said he was skeptical about the premise of the Meta glasses helping people remain present. "If you've got the camera with you, you're immediately not in the moment," he said. "Now you're wondering, Is this something I can present and record?"
The reporter admits they'll fondly cherish its photos of their dog [including in the original article], but "the main problem is that the glasses don't do much we can't already do with phones... while these types of moments are truly precious, that benefit probably won't be enough to convince a vast majority of consumers to buy smart glasses and wear them regularly, given the potential costs of lost privacy and distraction."