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alternative_right quotes a report from The Register: Space fans looking to camp out in style have a chance to pick up an Airstream trailer that once served as the Convoy Command Vehicle for NASA's Space Shuttle operations at Edwards Air Force Base -- if they have a couple hundred thousand to spare, that is. "This is the NASA 025 Command Vehicle," current owner Jonathan Kitzen says of the once-silver, now paint-daubed and otherwise unassuming Airstream trailer. "NASA 025 was designed to land crewed missions at Edwards Air Force Base. [Airstream] informed me that this was, in their, words, 'the only NASA Airstream ever sold,' and the others [001-024] were all crushed or in museums. The sister crew vehicle (a 28-ft with one rear axle) is sitting at Kennedy museum [the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex]. All the rest are gone, except for this one." Kitzen picked up the vehicle in 2022 up after spotting it on a government surplus auction site, where it had been listed with few details and at a very low starting price. As for how the rare vehicle ended up for sale in the first place, Kitzen says he was told it was a mistake. "Apparently there was some miscommunication when the vehicle was decommissioned," he claims in the sale listing. "It should have been offered to museums but the sales team did not know what it was. They were told it was just a 'NASA vehicle,' they did not know it had any special status or history. To the sellers they thought it was just a van that could have been for moving laundry around the base. It was an accidental (yet valid) sale. "When I pulled up to Vandenberg Air Force Base after getting my NASA contractor badge I was greeted by the senior asset manager," Kitzen continues. "'We didn't know what we were selling!' were the first words out of her mouth. 'We didn't advertise it or offer it up to museums, the phone has exploded. Nobody told us what it was!'" [...] The listing on vehicle sale site Hemmings.com has an asking price of $199,000, though with no offers yet submitted. A listing on eBay with a $50,000 minimum bid and $290,000 buy-it-now price ended in May with no takers.

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Science budget? Whatever. It's all about beating China and Russia

NASA's Acting Administrator, Sean Duffy, has directed the US space agency to come up with a plan to deploy a nuclear reactor on the Moon.…

Not a very smart home: crims could hijack smart-home boiler, open and close powered windows and more. Now fixed

Black hat A trio of researchers has disclosed a major prompt injection vulnerability in Google's Gemini large language model-powered applications.…

Campaigners brand Home Office’s lack of transparency as ‘astonishing’ and ‘dangerous’

Privacy groups report a surge in UK police facial recognition scans of databases secretly stocked with passport photos lacking parliamentary oversight.…

New SaaS system awaits a 'fully costed and deliverable integrated plan' before it can support 280,000 employees

The UK's pensions and social security department has modified a 12-year-old contract with Sopra Steria, tacking on more than £100 million to allow it to run legacy systems for another three years.…

alternative_right shares an interview from The Register with David W. Hill, who served as lead designer for ThinkPad from 1995 to 2017. Here are some excerpts from the wide-ranging interview: Hill revealed that he tried several times to introduce additional laptops that had the famous "butterfly keyboard" found on the ThinkPad 701C. [...] Hill told The Register that he had wanted to make more ThinkPads with butterfly keyboards and had tried at least three times to make it happen -- in one case there was a prototype where only half of the keyboard moved -- but was never able to get there. Eventually, screens became big enough that there was no need to have a keyboard that expanded. However, Hill said, he thought about putting a butterfly keyboard on a netbook when they were a viable product category in the late aughts. [...] One of the features Hill is most proud of developing is the ThinkLight, an overhead light located above the screen that lit up the entire keyboard and deck. Though the advent of keyboard backlights has made the ThinkLight redundant -- Lenovo discontinued it in 2013 -- it offers capabilities that backlights do not. If you want to place a paper on top of your keyboard, the LED will light it up, allowing you to see more than just your key legends. ... When designing the 25th anniversary ThinkPad, which came out in 2017, Hill brought back the ThinkLight, but he actually wanted to have -- for the first time -- two LEDs instead of one. The dual lights would have eliminated shadows and provided even better illumination, but unfortunately, this effort proved too costly to make it into the final product. [...] When I asked Hill about products he wanted to come out with but never got to, he talked about an idea for portable workstations that would fold up like a laptop but have a separate keyboard and screen like a desktop when you put them on your desk. He collaborated with butterfly keyboard creator John Karidis on this concept, but couldn't make it ready for market. "We did a lot of experimentation with laptops that sort of unfolded to be more like a desktop: things where the display elevated or the keyboard would remove so you could use them like a workstation, rather than just being a clamshell with a hinge, you open and close," Hill recalled. "We did a lot of experimentation with that and got close a few times, but never could completely sell it. I always thought it was an opportunity to create a new category."

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It's 'more than a temporary trend,' Decodo claims

Amid the furor around surging VPN usage in the UK, many users are eyeing proxies as a potential alternative to the technology.…

Modern language features plus high performance FrankenPHP app server make PHP worth another look

The PHP team is considering adding a partial implementation of generics to the language, has confirmed that a pipe operator will be in the forthcoming 8.5 release, and has formally adopted the FrankenPHP app server into the PHP Foundation.…

We're going out on a limb here... why not branch out from things like retina displays and get a little more fine grained?

Feature In a world where resolution, refresh rates, and frames per second can generate furious discussion, sometimes it's good to kick back and let a wood-flipping robot take the strain. Welcome to Kilopixel.…

A Microsoft Exit strategy isn’t just a good idea, it’s vital. It must go a long way beyond a farewell to Redmond

Opinion One of the dangers of stories based on big cash numbers is distraction. The numbers get all the attention, the bigger story behind them gets missed.…

Documentation was so substantial, staff measured it in feet

On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your stories of helping confused, caustic, and curmudgeonly customers to crank their computers into correct configurations.…

Ancient Slashdot reader Epeeist shares a report from The Guardian: The newest version of the maglev train is capable of traveling at 600km/h (about 370mph). However, the train's engineers have wrestled with the problem of the shock waves which occur as the train exits the mouth of a tunnel. When a high-speed train enters an enclosed space such as a tunnel, air in front is compressed, like in a piston. The resulting fluctuations in air pressure coalesce at the tunnel mouth, generating low-frequency shock waves. These are colloquially known as a "tunnel boom" -- a related, albeit different phenomenon to the "sonic boom" heard as aircraft pass the speed of sound. Tunnel booms pose serious challenges to operational safety, as the shock waves can disturb humans and animals nearby, as well as causing structural damage. Now, however, researchers have discovered that placing innovative soundproofing buffers at tunnel mouths can reduce shock waves by up to 96%. This promises improvements in operational safety, noise pollution and passenger comfort, as well as safeguarding animals in the vicinity of future lines. [...] The porous structure of the new 100-meter long buffers, combined with porous coatings on the tunnel body, allow the trapped air to escape before the train reaches the tunnel mouth, suppressing the boom in the same way as a silencer fitted to a firearm.

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Will someone think of the deals politicians are making?

Opinion You might think, since I write about tech all the time, my degrees are in computer science. Nope. I'm a bona fide, degreed historian, which is why I can say with confidence that the UK's recently passed Online Safety Act is doomed to fail.…

Home of Manchester Baby can't bid for talent, baby

Institutions in the North of England are being left out of the government's Global Talent Fund (GTF), designed to attract top scientific brains from abroad to come and work in Britain.…

Fears adversaries will use them in the belief they can take plenty of punishment

The US Air Force wants to blow up two Tesla Cybertrucks.…

A new connector may be on the cards, too

The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has confirmed that version 8.0 of the PCI Express (PCIe) specification will allow up to 256 gigatransfers per second, which equates to up to 1 TB/s bi-directionally in a x16 configuration.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Some of the first reviews ever written for the original Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. have been digitized and published by the Video Game History Foundation. The reviews appeared in Computer Entertainer, an early video game magazine that ran from 1982 to 1990. The archivists at the Foundation tracked down the magazine's entire run and have published it all online under a Creative Commons license.

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Backer SoftBank isn't fussed, is excited that Arm will provide half of new cloudy CPUs this year

The $500 billion Stargate project that aims to build a network of AI datacenters around the globe is off to a slow start, but its main backer – Japan’s SoftBank – isn’t worried.…

Duolingo's decision to go "AI-first" sparked backlash from users, but the company's second quarter earnings result tell a different story. Quarterly revenue exceeded expectations, stock surged nearly 30%, and daily active users grew 40% year-over-year. TechCrunch reports: Now the company anticipates making over $1 billion in revenue this year, and daily active users have grown 40% year-over-year. The growth is significant but falls in the lower range of the company's estimates of growing between 40% and 45%, which an investor brought up to [CEO Luis von Ahn] on Wednesday's quarterly earnings call. "The reason we came [in] towards the lower end was because I said some stuff about AI, and I didn't give enough context. Because of that, we got some backlash on social media," von Ahn said. "The most important thing is we wanted to make the sentiment on our social media positive. We stopped posting edgy posts and started posting things that would get our sentiment more positive. That has worked."

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Despite dwindling global market share, retreat from key regions like Europe, and halting in-house production, Sony insists its Xperia smartphone line remains "very important" to its business. 9to5Google reports: During Sony's latest financial results presentation this week, Sony CFO Lin Tao addressed the state of its Xperia smartphone brand, saying that Xperia is part of "a very important business for us" as reported by CNET Japan (translated). Tao said that "communication technology is a very important technology that Sony has cultivated for a long time. We also want to continue to value our smartphone business." Though adding that "communication technology is used in areas other than smartphones."

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