America's push to manufacturer more products domestically gets an in-depth look from CNET — including a new Intel chip factory outside of Phoenix.

CNET calls it a fork in the road "after squandering its lead because of a half decade of problems modernizing its manufacturing..." With "a decade of bad decisions, this doesn't get fixed overnight," says Pat Gelsinger, Intel's new chief executive, in an interview. "But the bottom is behind us and the slope is starting to feel increasingly strong...." More fabs are on the way, too. In an enormous empty patch of dirt at its existing Arizona site, Intel has just begun building fabs 52 and 62 at a total cost of $20 billion, set to make Intel's most advanced chips, starting in 2024. Later this year, it hopes to announce the U.S. location for its third major manufacturing complex, a 1,000-acre site costing about $100 billion. The spending commitment makes this year's $3.5 billion upgrade to its New Mexico fab look cheap. The goal is to restore the U.S. share of chip manufacturing, which has slid from 37% in 1990 to 12% today. "Over the decade in front of us, we should be striving to bring the U.S. to 30% of worldwide semiconductor manufacturing," Gelsinger says...

But returning Intel to its glory days — and anchoring a resurgent U.S. electronics business in the process — is much easier said than done. Making chips profitably means running fabs at maximum capacity to pay off the gargantuan investments required to stay at the leading edge. A company that can't keep pace gets squeezed out, like IBM in 2014 or Global Foundries in 2018. To catch up after its delays, Intel now plans to upgrade its manufacturing five times in the next four years, a breakneck pace by industry standards. "This new roadmap that they announced is really aggressive," says Linley Group analyst Linley Gwennap. "I don't have any idea how they are going to accomplish all of that...."

Gelsinger has a tech-first recovery plan. He's pledged to accelerate manufacturing upgrades to match the technology of TSMC and Samsung by 2024 and surpass them in 2025. He's opening Intel's fabs to other companies that need chips built through its new Intel Foundry Services (IFS). And he's relying on other foundries, including TSMC, for about a quarter of Intel's near-term chipmaking needs to keep its chips more competitive during the upgrades. This three-pronged strategy is called IDM (integrated design and manufacturing) 2.0. That's a new take on Intel's philosophy of both designing and making chips. It's more ambitious than the future some had expected, in which Intel would sell its factories and join the ranks of "fabless" chip designers like Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm that rely on others for manufacturing...

Shareholders may not like Gelsinger's spending-heavy strategy, but one community really does: Intel's engineers... Gelsigner told the board that Intel is done with stock buybacks, a financial move in which a company uses its cash to buy stock and thereby increase its price. "We're investing in factories," he told me. "That's going to be the use of our cash...."

"We cannot recall the last time Intel put so many stakes in the ground," said BMO Capital Markets analyst Ambrish Srivastava in a July research report after Intel announced its schedule.
Intel will even outpace Moore's law, Gelsinger tells CNET — more than doubling the transistor count on processors every two years. "I believe that you're going to see from 2025 to 2035 a very healthy period for Moore's Law-like behavior."

Although that still brings some risk to Intel's investments if they have to pass the costs on to customer, a Linley Group analyst points out to CNET. "Moore's Law is not going to end when we can't build smaller transistors. It's going to end when somebody says I don't want to pay for smaller transistors."

Recently Australian developer Geoffrey Huntley announced they'd created a 20-terabyte archive of all NFTs on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains.

But one NFT startup company now says they tried downloading the archive — and discovered most of it was zeroes. Many of the articles are careful to point out "we have not verified the contents of the torrent," because of course they couldn't. A 20TB torrent would take several days to download, necessitating a pretty beefy internet connection and more disk space to store than most people have at their disposal. We at ClubNFT fired up a massive AWS instance with 40TB of EBS disk space to attempt to download this, with a cost estimate of $10k-20k over the next month, as we saw this torrent as potentially an easy way to pre-seed our NFT storage efforts — not many people have these resources to devote to a single news story.

Fortunately, we can save you the trouble of downloading the entire torrent — all you need is about 10GB. Download the first 10GB of the torrent, plus the last block, and you can fill in all the rest with zeroes. In other words, it's empty; and no, Geoff did not actually download all the NFTs. Ironically, Geoff has archived all of the media articles about this and linked them on TheNFTBay's site, presumably to preserve an immutable record of the spread and success of his campaign — kinda like an NFT...

We were hoping this was real... [I]t is actually rather complicated to correctly download and secure the media for even a single NFT, nevermind trying to do it for every NFT ever made. This is why we were initially skeptical of Geoff's statements. But even if he had actually downloaded all the NFT media and made it available as a torrent, this would not have solved the problem... a torrent containing all the NFTs does nothing to actually make those NFTs available via IPFS, which is the network they must be present on in order for the NFTs to be visible on marketplaces and galleries....

[A]nd this is a bit in the weeds: in order to reupload an NFT's media to IPFS, you need more than just the media itself. In order to restore a file to IPFS so it can continue to be located by the original link embedded in the NFT, you must know exactly the settings used when that file was originally uploaded, and potentially even the exact version of the IPFS software used for the upload.

For these reasons and more, ClubNFT is working hard on an actual solution to ensure that everybody's NFTs can be safely secured by the collectors themselves. We look forward to providing more educational resources on these and other topics, and welcome the attention that others, like Geoff, bring to these important issues.
Their article was shared by a Slashdot reader (who is one of ClubNFT's three founders). I'd wondered suspiciously if ClubNFT was a hoax, but if this PR Newswire press release is legit, they've raised $3 million in seed funding. (And that does include an investment from Drapen Dragon, co-founded by Tim Draper which shows up on CrunchBase). The International Business Times has also covered ClubNFT, identifying it as a startup whose mission statement is "to build the next generation of NFT solutions to help collectors discover, protect, and share digital assets." Co-founder and CEO Jason Bailey said these next-generation tools are in their "discovery" phase, and one of the first set of tools that is designed to provide a backup solution for NFTs will roll out early next year. Speaking to International Business Times, Bailey said, "We are looking at early 2022 to roll out the backup solution. But between now and then we should be feeding (1,500 beta testers) valuable information about their wallets." Bailey says while doing the beta testing, he realized that there are loopholes in the NFT storage systems and only 40% of the NFTs were actually pointing to the IPFS, while 40% of them were at risk — pointing to private servers.

Here is the problem explained: NFTs are basically a collection of metadata, that define the underlying property that is owned. Just like in the world of internet documents, links point to the art and any details about it that are being stored. But links can break, or die. Many NFTs use a system called InterPlanetary File System, or IPFS, which let you find a piece of content as long as it is hosted somewhere on the IPFS network. Unlike in the world of internet domains, you don't need to own the domain to really make sure the data is safe. Explaining the problem which the backup tool will address, Bailey said, "When you upload an image to IPFS, it creates a cryptographic hash. And if someone ever stops paying to store that image on IPFS, as long as you have the original image, you can always restore it. That's why we're giving people the right to download the image.... [W]e're going to start with this protection tool solution that will allow people to click a button and download all the assets associated with their NFT collection and their wallet in the exact format that they would need it in to restore it back up to IPFS, should it ever disappear. And we're not going to charge any money for that."

The idea, he said, is that collectors should not have to trust any company; rather they can use ClubNFT's tool, whenever it becomes available, to download the files locally... "One of the things that we're doing early around that discovery process, we're building out a tool that looks in your wallet and can see who you collect, and then go a level deeper and see who they collect," Bailey said. Bailey said that the rest of the tools will process after gathering lessons based on user feedback on the first set of solutions. He, however, seemed positive that the talks of the next set of tools will begin in the Spring of next year as the company has laid a "general roadmap."

"One way to help eliminate carbon emissions and thereby fight global warming may be to exploit fusion, the energy source of the sun and stars..." argues a new article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (shared by Slashdot reader DanDrollette).

Though fusion energy would involve controllng a "plasma" gas of positively charged nuclei and negatively charged electrons heated to 150 million degrees Celsius, progress is being made — and the upside could be tremendous: One major advantage of using fusion as an energy source is that its underlying physics precludes either a fuel meltdown — such as what happened at Three Mile Island and Fukushima Daichi — or a runaway reaction, such as at Chernobyl. Furthermore, the amount of radioactive material that could be released in an accident in a fusion power plant system is much less than in a fission reactor. Consequently, a fusion system has much less capability to damage itself, and any damage would have much less dangerous consequences. As a result, current concepts for fusion systems may not necessitate an evacuation plan beyond the site boundary. Another advantage of fusion is that neither the fuel nor its products create the very long-lived radioactive waste that fission does, which means that fusion does not require long-term, geological storage...

When and how can fusion contribute to mitigating climate change? Private companies are in a hurry to develop fusion, and many say that they will be able to put commercial fusion power on the US electric grid in the early 2030s. The total private financing in this sector is impressive, at about $2 billion... After looking over the state of publicly and privately funded fusion research, the National Academies recommended that the United States embark upon a program to develop multiple preliminary designs for a fusion pilot plant by 2028, with the goal of putting a modest amount of net electricity on the U.S. electrical grid from a pilot plant starting sometime in the years between 2035 and 2040, use the pilot plant to study and develop technologies for fusion, and have a first-of-a-kind commercial fusion power plant operational by 2050. The United Kingdom has recently announced a plan to build a prototype fusion power plant by 2040. China has a plan to begin operation of a fusion engineering test reactor in the 2030s, while the European Union foresees operation of a demonstration fusion power plant in the 2050s...

We must look beyond the 2035 timeframe to see how fusion can make a major contribution, and how it can complement renewables... [P]roviding low-carbon electricity in the world market, including later in the century, is of great importance for holding climate change at bay.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Texas, already home to the most vulnerable power grid in the U.S., is about to be hit by a surge in demand for electricity that's twice the size of Austin's. An army of cryptocurrency miners heading to the state for its cheap power and laissez-faire regulation is forecast to send demand soaring by as much as 5,000 megawatts over the next two years. The crypto migration to Texas has been building for months, but the sheer volume of power those miners will need -- two times more than the capital city of almost 1 million people consumed in all of 2020 -- is only now becoming clear.

The boom comes as the electrical system is already under strain from an expanding population and robust economy. Even before the new demand comes online, the state's grid has proven to be lethally unreliable. Catastrophic blackouts in February plunged millions into darkness for days, and, ultimately, led to at least 210 deaths. Proponents like Senator Ted Cruz and Governor Greg Abbott, both Republicans, say crypto miners are ultimately good for the grid, since they say the miners can soak up excess clean power and, when needed, can voluntarily throttle back in seconds to help avert blackouts. But it raises the question of what these miners will do when the state's electricity demand inevitably outstrips supply: Will they adhere to an honor system of curtailing their power use, especially when the Bitcoin price is itself so high, or will it mean even more pressure on an overwhelmed grid?

Miners setting up shop in the Lone Star State can often count on a 10-year tax abatement, sales tax credits and workforce training from the state, depending on where they are located and how many jobs they add. Even without formal incentives, the cheap power prices and the state's hands-off policy toward business is often enough of a lure. The pitch is working: The grid operator Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or Ercot, will account for about 20% of the Bitcoin network globally by the end of 2022, up from 8% to 10% today, according to Lee Bratcher, president of the Texas Blockchain council. Right now, Ercot has somewhere between 500 and 1,000 megawatts of mining capacity, out of about 2,000 nationwide. The state grid will add another 3,000 to 5,000 megawatts of mining demand by the end of 2023, he said.

Zero emissions and, soon, zero crew: the world's first fully electric autonomous cargo vessel was unveiled in Norway, a small but promising step toward reducing the maritime industry's climate footprint. TechXplore reports: By shipping up to 120 containers of fertilizer from a plant in the southeastern town of Porsgrunn to the Brevik port a dozen kilometres (about eight miles) away, the much-delayed Yara Birkeland, shown off to the media on Friday, will eliminate the need for around 40,000 truck journeys a year that are now fueled by polluting diesel. The 80-meter, 3,200-deadweight tonne ship will soon begin two years of working trials during which it will be fine-tuned to learn to maneuver on its own.

The wheelhouse could disappear altogether in "three, four or five years", said Holsether, once the vessel makes its 7.5-nautical-mile trips on its own with the aid of sensors. "Quite a lot of the incidents happening on vessels are due to human error, because of fatigue for instance," project manager Jostein Braaten said from the possibly doomed bridge. "Autonomous operating can enable a safe journey," he said.

On board the Yara Birkeland, the traditional machine room has been replaced by eight battery compartments, giving the vessel a capacity of 6.8 MWh -- sourced from renewable hydroelectricity. "That's the equivalent of 100 Teslas," says Braaten. The maritime sector, which is responsible for almost three percent of all man-made emissions, aims to reduce its emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and 50 percent by 2050. Despite that, the sector has seen a rise in recent years.

Ford CEO Jim Farley announced that the automaker is planning to produce 600,000 electric vehicles per year by the end of 2023, "which will double the number of EVs it originally intended to manufacture," notes Engadget. From the report: According to Automotive News, production will be spread across the Mustang Mach-E, F-150 Lightning and E-Transit. Ford's current EV lineup is wildly popular, Farley said, and the demand is "so much higher" than the company expected. The Mustang Mach-E is selling on three continents, while the Ford F-150 Lightning has been popular from the time it was announced. Ford received 100,000 reservations within three weeks after it was unveiled, and that number's now up to 160,000 -- all placed with a $100 refundable deposit. Due to the high demand for the F-150, Ford previously decided to invest $250 million to boost its production, creating 450 new jobs to help it make 80,000 trucks a year. It's unclear how much that target would change now that the company is doubling its manufacturing goal.

The company announced today that its Everyday Robots Project -- a team within its experimental X labs dedicated to creating "a general-purpose learning robot" -- has moved some of its prototype machines out of the lab and into Google's Bay Area campuses to carry out some light custodial tasks. The Verge reports: "We are now operating a fleet of more than 100 robot prototypes that are autonomously performing a range of useful tasks around our offices," said Everyday Robot's chief robot officer Hans Peter Brondmo in a blog post. "The same robot that sorts trash can now be equipped with a squeegee to wipe tables and use the same gripper that grasps cups can learn to open doors."

These robots in question are essentially arms on wheels, with a multipurpose gripper on the end of a flexible arm attached to a central tower. There's a "head" on top of the tower with cameras and sensors for machine vision and what looks like a spinning lidar unit on the side, presumably for navigation. As Brondmo indicates, these bots were first seen sorting out recycling when Alphabet debuted the Everyday Robot team in 2019. The big promise that's being made by the company (as well as by many other startups and rivals) is that machine learning will finally enable robots to operate in "unstructured" environments like homes and offices.

NFTs are unique blockchain entries through which people can prove that they own something. However, the underlying images can be copied with a single click. This point is illustrated by The NFT Bay which links to a 19.5 Terabyte collection of 'all NFTs' on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. (UPDATE: One NFT startup is claiming that the collection is mostly just zeroes, and does not in fact contain all of the NFTs.)

But the archive also delivered an important warning message too. TorrentFreak reports: "The Billion Dollar Torrent," as it's called, reportedly includes all the NFTs on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. These files are bundled in a massive torrent that points to roughly 15 terabytes of data. Unpacked, this adds up to almost 20 terabytes. Australian developer Geoff is the brains behind the platform, which he describes as an art project. Speaking with TorrentFreak, he says that The Pirate Bay was used as inspiration for nostalgic reasons, which needs further explanation.

The NFT Bay is not just any random art project. It does come with a message, perhaps a wake-up call, for people who jump on the NFT bandwagon without fully realizing what they're spending their crypto profits on. "Purchasing NFT art right now is nothing more than directions on how to access or download an image. The image is not stored on the blockchain and the majority of images I've seen are hosted on Web 2.0 storage which is likely to end up as 404 meaning the NFT has even less value." The same warning is more sharply articulated in the torrent's release notes which are styled in true pirate fashion. "[T]his handy torrent contains all of the NFT's so that future generations can study this generation's tulip mania and collectively go..." it reads.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Interesting Engineering: Founded by Bill Gates, TerraPower, a company that plans to use nuclear energy to deliver power in a sustainable manner, has selected Kremmer, Wyoming as a suitable site to demonstrate its advanced nuclear reactor, Natrium. The decision was made after extensive evaluation of the site and consultations with the local community, the company said in a press release.

Last year, the Department of Energy (DOE) had awarded TerraPower a grant of $80 million to demonstrate its technology. The advanced nuclear reactor that is being developed by the company in association with General Electric-Hitachi, uses a sodium-cooled fast reactor that works with a molten salt-based energy storage system. Earlier in June, the company had decided to set up its demonstration plant in Wyoming and has recently sealed the decision by selecting the site of a coal-fired power plant that is scheduled for a shut down by 2025, the press release said.

The demonstration plant where the company plans to set up a 345 MW reactor will be used to validate the design, construction, and operation of TerraPower's technology. Natrium technology uses uranium enriched to up to 20 percent, far higher than what is used by other nuclear reactors. However, nuclear energy supporters say that the technology creates lesser nuclear waste, Reuters reported. The energy storage system to be used in the plant is also designed to work with renewable sources of energy. TerraPower plans to utilize this capability and boost its output to up to 500 MW, enough to power 400,000 homes, the company said.

Qualcomm is looking to seriously beef up its PC processors, with the company announcing plans for a next-generation Arm-based SoC "designed to set the performance benchmark for Windows PCs" that would be able to go head to head with Apple's M-series processors. From a report: Dr. James Thompson, Qualcomm's chief technology officer, announced the plans for the new chips at the company's 2021 investor day event, with the goal of getting samples to hardware customers in about nine months ahead of product launches with the new chip in 2023. The new chip will be designed by the Nuvia team, which Qualcomm had bought earlier this year in a massive $1.4 billion acquisition. Nuvia, notably, was founded in 2019 by a trio of former Apple employees who had previously worked on the company's A-series chips. The company is making big promises, too: in addition to offering competition to Apple's stellar M-series chips (which power its latest MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops and iMac and Mac Mini desktops), Qualcomm is aiming to lead the field for "sustained performance and battery life," too.

"An unprivileged application can corrupt data in memory by accessing 'hammering' rows of DDR4 memory in certain patterns millions of times a second, giving those untrusted applications nearly unfettered system privileges," writes long-time Slashdot reader shoor. Ars Technica reports: Rowhammer attacks work by accessing -- or hammering -- physical rows inside vulnerable chips millions of times per second in ways that cause bits in neighboring rows to flip, meaning 1s turn to 0s and vice versa. Researchers have shown the attacks can be used to give untrusted applications nearly unfettered system privileges, bypass security sandboxes designed to keep malicious code from accessing sensitive operating system resources, and root or infect Android devices, among other things. All previous Rowhammer attacks have hammered rows with uniform patterns, such as single-sided, double-sided, or n-sided. In all three cases, these "aggressor" rows -- meaning those that cause bitflips in nearby "victim" rows -- are accessed the same number of times.

Research published on Monday presented a new Rowhammer technique. It uses non-uniform patterns that access two or more aggressor rows with different frequencies. The result: all 40 of the randomly selected DIMMs in a test pool experienced bitflips, up from 13 out of 42 chips tested in previous work (PDF) from the same researchers. "We found that by creating special memory access patterns we can bypass all mitigations that are deployed inside DRAM," Kaveh Razavi and Patrick Jattke, two of the research authors, wrote in an email. "This increases the number of devices that can potentially be hacked with known attacks to 80 percent, according to our analysis. These issues cannot be patched due to their hardware nature and will remain with us for many years to come."

The non-uniform patterns work against Target Row Refresh. Abbreviated as TRR, the mitigation works differently from vendor to vendor but generally tracks the number of times a row is accessed and recharges neighboring victim rows when there are signs of abuse. The neutering of this defense puts further pressure on chipmakers to mitigate a class of attacks that many people thought more recent types of memory chips were resistant to. In Monday's paper, the researchers wrote: "Proprietary, undocumented in-DRAM TRR is currently the only mitigation that stands between Rowhammer and attackers exploiting it in various scenarios such as browsers, mobile phones, the cloud, and even over the network. In this paper, we show how deviations from known uniform Rowhammer access patterns allow attackers to flip bits on all 40 recently-acquired DDR4 DIMMs, 2.6x more than the state of the art. The effectiveness of these new non-uniform patterns in bypassing TRR highlights the need for a more principled approach to address Rowhammer." While PCs, laptops, and mobile phones are most affected by the new findings, the report notes that cloud services like AWS and Azure "remain largely safe from Rowhammer because they use higher-end chips that include a defense known as ECC, short for Error Correcting Code."

"Concluding, our work confirms that the DRAM vendors' claims about Rowhammer protections are false and lure you into a false sense of security," the researchers wrote. "All currently deployed mitigations are insufficient to fully protect against Rowhammer. Our novel patterns show that attackers can more easily exploit systems than previously assumed."

The UK's digital and cultural secretary will instruct the country's Competition & Markets Authority to conduct "an in-depth inquiry into antitrust concerns" over NVIDIA's purchase of ARM, reports the Sunday Times, "as well as scrutinise national security fears raised by the takeover...."

Engadget reports: A second investigation would reportedly last about six months. After that, officials could either block the deal, approve it as-is or require concessions...

The tech firm has focused its energy so far on downplaying concerns about ARM's neutrality if the deal closes, promising an open licensing model that treats customers fairly.

Any second investigation wouldn't necessarily spell doom for NVIDIA's acquisition. It would suggest the government has some qualms, however, and that NVIDIA might have to make some sacrifices. At the least, the company would have to be patient — it wouldn't get UK approval until 2022 at the earliest, and it would still have to wait for other regulators before finalizing the merger.
In other news, ARM has joined the Rust Foundation.

This weekend Toyota's president drove a specially-equipped Corolla powered by an in-house hydrogen engine, reports Bloomberg. "Along with Mazda Motor Corp., Toyota showcased vehicles running on carbon-neutral propellants in a three-hour road race this weekend in Okayama." Toyota's hydrogen-powered car underscores the automaker's belief that a wide variety of vehicle types — including hybrids and hydrogen-powered cars, in addition to electric vehicles — will play a role in decarbonizing its fleet over the coming decades. That puts the company in contrast to others, such as General Motors Co., Jaguar Land Rover and Volvo Car AB, which say they'll sell only EVs two decades from now. "The enemy is carbon, not internal combustion engines," Toyoda said at a briefing Saturday. "We need diverse solutions, that's the path toward challenging carbon neutrality."

Toyota says that that different emissions-reducing car technologies are needed for different regions of the world. EVs are a good option for places like Europe, where batteries can be charged with electricity derived largely from renewable sources, the automaker says. Other options, such as hydrogen or hybrids, may be a better fit in other regions.

The technology is separate from the company's other big bet on hydrogen — hydrogen fuel cells such as those that power the Mirai passenger car. While fuel cells use the chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity, which in turn runs a motor, the hydrogen engine burns the element just like gasoline. Traditional engines only need to be tweaked in minor ways, such as changing out the fuel supply and injection systems, to make them capable of running on hydrogen, Toyota Chief Engineer Naoyuki Sakamoto said in a briefing last month. That also makes the technology a way to save some of the hundreds of thousands of jobs making parts related to combustion engines that are predicted to disappear in Japan if the automotive sector makes a full shift to EVs, according to Toyoda.

Untraceable "ghost guns" assembled from parts bought online "can be ordered by gang members, felons and even children," writes the New York Times.

They call the guns "increasingly the lethal weapon of easy access around the U.S., but especially California," based on interviews with law enforcement officials in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego and San Francisco: Over the past 18 months, the officials said, ghost guns accounted for 25 to 50 percent of firearms recovered at crime scenes. The vast majority of suspects caught with them were legally prohibited from having guns. "I've been on the force for 30 years next month, and I've never seen anything like this," said Lt. Paul Phillips of the San Diego Police Department, who this year organized the force's first unit dedicated to homemade firearms. By the beginning of October, he said, the department had recovered almost 400 ghost guns, about double the total for all of 2020 with nearly three months to go in the year.

Law enforcement officials are not exactly sure why their use is taking off. But they believe it is basically a matter of a new, disruptive technology gradually gaining traction in a market, then rocketing up when buyers catch on. This isn't just happening on the West Coast. Since January 2016, about 25,000 privately made firearms have been confiscated by local and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide... There is a huge surfeit of supplies in circulation, enough to supply dealers who sell pre-assembled guns, via social media platforms or the dark web, for years. At the same time, the increasing availability of 3-D printers, which can create the plastic and metal components of guns, has opened a new backdoor source of illegal weapons for gangs and drug dealers who would otherwise have to steal them.

"This isn't going away," said Los Angeles city attorney, Mike Feuer...

Brian Muhammad, who works with at-risk young people in Stockton, said he recently asked a group of teenagers where they got their guns. "Did you drive to Vegas?" he asked, referring to Nevada's looser gun laws. They looked at him as if he were crazy.

"Who would do that?" one of them replied. "You order them in pieces using your phone."

Slashdot reader AltMachine writes: In October 2019, Google said its Sycamore processor was the first to achieve quantum supremacy by completing a task in three minutes and 20 seconds that would have taken the best classical supercomputer, IBM's Summit, 10,000 years. That claim — particularly how Google scientists arrived at the "10,000 years" conclusion — has been questioned by some researchers, but the counterclaim itself was not definitive.

Now though, in a paper to be submitted to a scientific journal for peer review, scientists at the Institute of Theoretical Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences said their algorithm on classical computers completed the simulation for the Sycamore quantum circuits [possibly paywalled; alternative source of the same article] "in about 15 hours using 512 graphics processing units (GPUs)" at a higher fidelity than Sycamore's. Further, the team said "if our simulation of the quantum supremacy circuits can be implemented in an upcoming exaflop supercomputer with high efficiency, in principle, the overall simulation time can be reduced to a few dozens of seconds, which is faster than Google's hardware experiments".

As China unveiled a photonic quantum computer which solved a Gaussian boson sampling problem in 200 seconds that would have taken 600 million years on classical computer, in December 2020, disproving Sycamore's claim would place China being the first country to achieve quantum supremacy.

Research studying the possibility of electrifying rail-based freight "finds that the technology is pretty much ready," reports Ars Technica, "and under the right circumstances, the economics are on the verge of working out."

It helps that the price of batteries have dropped 87% over the last decade: In the U.S., the typical freight car travels an average of 241 kilometers per day when in operation. So the researchers created a battery big enough to move that distance as part of a large freight train (four locomotives, 100 freight cars, and about 7,000 tonnes of payload). They found that lithium ferrous phosphate would let each of the four locomotives be serviced by a single freight car configured as a giant battery. The battery would only occupy 40 percent of the volume of a typical boxcar and would be seven tonnes below the weight limit imposed by existing bridges. Because of the efficiency of direct electric power, the train would use only half the energy consumed by an internal combustion engine driving an on-board generator...

Using an economic measure called the "net present value," the researchers determine that switching to batteries alone would cost $15 billion. But taking the pollution damages into account turns the number into a $44 billion savings. Considering climate damages as well boosts the savings to $94 billion. Even if these damages are ignored, a rise in the price of diesel and allowing freight companies to buy power at wholesale rates come close to shifting the costs to neutral... [F]reight companies could use their capacity to provide grid stabilization services or sell back power when the price gets high. In extreme cases, this system could actually pay for the entire infrastructure.

"Preliminary estimates of the most expensive 90 hours per year in the ERCOT [Texas] market, for example, show that batteries could be discharged at $200/kWh, potentially generating enough revenue to pay for the upfront battery cost in a single year," the study says.
Special thanks to clovis (Slashdot reader #4,684) for the submission — and for also sharing "some general info about diesel-electric locomotives" and "some detail on the AC-DC-AC drive."

SiliconANGLE reports on why investors poured another $250 million into Cerebras Systems Inc: Enterprises typically use graphics processing units in their AI projects. The fastest GPU on the market today features about 54 billion transistors. Cerebras Systems' chip, the WSE-2, includes 2.6 trillion transistors that the startup says make it the "fastest AI processor on Earth."

WSE-2 stands for Wafer Scale Engine 2, a nod to the unique architecture on which the startup has based the processor. The typical approach to chip production is carving as many as several dozen processors into a silicon wafer and then separating them. Cerebras Systems is using a vastly different method: The startup carves a single large processor into the silicon wafer that isn't broken up into smaller units.

The 2.6 trillion transistors in the WSE-2 are organized into 850,000 cores...

Cerebras Systems says that the WSE-2 has 123 times more cores and 1,000 times more on-chip memory than the closest GPU. The chip's impressive specifications translate into several benefits for customers, according to the startup, most notably increased processing efficiency. To match the performance provided by a WSE-2 chip, a company would have to deploy dozens or hundreds of traditional GPU servers... With the WSE-2, data doesn't have to travel between two different servers but only from one section of the chip to another, which represents a much shorter distance. The shorter distance reduces processing delays. Cerebras Systems says that the result is an increase in the speed at which neural networks can run.

North Dakota has just 266 electric cars, the fewest of any state in America, reports the Washington Post. But the state's biggest booster for electric cars may be: the coal industry: The thinking is straightforward: More electric cars would mean more of a market for the [lower carbon] lignite coal that produces most of North Dakota's electricity, and if a long-shot project to store carbon emissions in deep underground wells works out, it might even result in cleaner air as well. "EVs will be soaking up electricity," said Jason Bohrer, head of a coal trade group that has launched a statewide campaign to promote electric vehicles and charging stations along North Dakota's vast distances. "So coal power plants, our most resilient and available power plants, can continue to be online...."

In North Dakota, Wyoming, West Virginia — and in the nine other states where coal is the main fuel for electric power plants — electric cars will still rely on the combustion of ancient carbon-based deposits for their energy unless other sources of power come to the fore... [C]oal remains by far the main fuel for power plants worldwide, and a recent surge in its price suggests that demand is not waning. Without an intensive turn to carbon capture — a technically feasible but commercially unproven technology — electric vehicles may not be able to make that much of a difference in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions... [A] carbon capture experiment at the Milton R. Young Generation Station adjacent to the BNI mine, devised by a partnership of scientists and the Minnkota Power Cooperative, could make coal more attractive in the clean-energy future — if it works. The idea, known as Project Tundra, is to scrub the carbon dioxide out of the plant's exhaust smoke, condense it and inject it into deep wells...

Carbon capture has been a popular idea within the coal, oil and gas sectors for years now. The technology is not out of reach. Plenty of pilot projects have been launched. But so far no one has been able to make it a paying proposition. A pioneering $7.5 billion carbon capture power plant in Mississippi was razed with dynamite on Oct. 9 after its owners wrote it off as an 11-year-old economic failure. North Dakota hopes to break through that last barrier, for both coal and oil... If Project Tundra can show that stuffing carbon dioxide back into the earth is economically feasible, he said, "it's opening the door for a CO2 economy. It gives the lignite [coal] industry a way to survive." His group has launched a promotional campaign called Drive Electric North Dakota, which sponsors promotional events, conducts public attitude surveys and lobbies for EVs in the state capital...

Clean-air advocates range from dubious to dismissive. The promise of electric vehicles wasn't that they would spur more coal mining — or oil extraction...

And unproven though it may be, critics contend, the publicity surrounding carbon capture has created a false sense of complacency that world-changing solutions are just around the corner.
The Post also reports that "the oil sector, too, is putting its chips on carbon capture... "

"Texans will be paying for the effects of last February's cold snap for decades to come," reports Ars Technica, "as the state's oil and gas regulator approved a plan for natural gas utilities to recover $3.4 billion in debt they incurred during the storm.

"The regulator, the Railroad Commission, is allowing utilities to issue bonds to cover the debt. As a result, ratepayers could see an increase in their bills for the next 30 years." During the winter storm, natural gas prices spiked as cold temperatures drove demand up while also depressing supply... The governor's office knew of the looming shortages days before they happened, yet the preparations they made did little to alter the course of the disaster... Gas sellers made record profits in just a few days, together bringing in as much as $11 billion, about 70-100 times more than normal, based on spot prices at the time. Meanwhile, many Texans suffered through blackouts and bitter cold, and 210 people died, according to the latest estimate from the Texas Department of State Health Services.

In the wake of the storm, many officials have called on utilities and oil and gas companies to winterize their operations...

Texans aren't the only ones whose bills are higher as a result of producers' and utilities' unwillingness to winterize their equipment. Utilities around the country were forced to buy natural gas at significantly higher prices when Texas' markets went haywire as a result of low supply and high demand. Ratepayers as far away as Minnesota will be paying surcharges for years to come after their utilities had to pay $800 million more than expected for natural gas.
The article also includes a quote from Katie Sieben, chairwoman of the Minnesota Public Utility Commission, from an April article in The Washington Post.

"It is maddening and outrageous and completely inexcusable that Texas' lack of sound utility regulation is having this impact on the rest of the country."

The Apple-1, one of Apple's first computers, fetched $400,000 at auction in the U.S. earlier this week. Slashdot reader schwit1 first shared the news with us. The BBC reports: The rare Hawaiian koa wood-cased Apple-1 -- still functioning -- is one of only 200 made and sold in kit form. The computer has only had two owners, a college professor and his student to whom he sold the machine for $650, said John Moran Auctioneers in California. The sale included user manuals and Apple software on two cassette tapes.

The koa wood case of the auctioned model was added by a pioneering early computer retailer, ByteShop, in California, which took delivery of around 50 of the Apple-1 machines. In 1976, the machines were sold for $666.66, reportedly because Wozniak liked repeating numbers. It is believed there are around 20 such computers in the world still capable of functioning. The auctioned machine is not the highest-grossing Apple-1 computer -- that distinction belongs to a working version that sold for $905,000 at a Bonhams auction in New York in 2014.