Ted Kaczynski, Known as the 'Unabomber,' has Died in Prison at Age 81

Because he targeted universities and airlines, the FBI had dubbed him the Unabomber, reports the Associated Press: Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, died Saturday. He was 81... Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina, Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons, told The Associated Press. He was found unresponsive in his cell early Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8 a.m., she said. A cause of death was not immediately known. Before his transfer to the prison medical facility, he had been held in the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998, when he was sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years for a campaign of terror that set universities nationwide on edge. He admitted committing 16 bombings from 1978 and 1995, permanently maiming several of his victims. Years before the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax mailing, the "Unabomber's" deadly homemade bombs changed the way Americans mailed packages and boarded airplanes, even virtually shutting down air travel on the West Coast in July 1995. He forced The Washington Post, in conjunction with The New York Times, to make the agonizing decision in September 1995 to publish his 35,000-word manifesto, "Industrial Society and Its Future," which claimed modern society and technology was leading to a sense of powerlessness and alienation. [The Post published it "at the urging of federal authorities, after the bomber said he would desist from terrorism if a national publication published his treatise."] But it led to his undoing. Kaczynski's brother David and David's wife, Linda Patrik, recognized the treatise's tone and tipped off the FBI, which had been searching for the "Unabomber" for years in nation's longest, costliest manhunt. Authorities in April 1996 found him in a 10-by-14-foot (3-by-4-meter) plywood and tarpaper cabin outside Lincoln, Montana, that was filled with journals, a coded diary, explosive ingredients and two completed bombs. A psychiatrist who interview him in prison said Kaczynski suffered from persecutorial delusions, the article points out. "I certainly don't claim to be an altruist or to be acting for the 'good' (whatever that is) of the human race," Kaczynski wrote on April 6, 1971. "I act merely from a desire for revenge." A stand-up comic once joked that the only technology that Kaczynski didn't have a problem with....was bombs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN Sees 'Escalating Battle' Over Returning to the Office at Tech Companies

CNN explores tech-company efforts to curtail remote working. "Salesforce is trying to lure staff into offices by offering to donate $10 to a local charity for each day an employee comes in from June 12 to June 23, according to an internal Slack message reported on by Fortune." CNN notes a recent walk-out at Amazon protesting (in part) new return-to-office policies, as well as Meta's upcoming three-days-a-week in-office mandate. But CNN adds that it's Google that "has long been a bellwether for workplace policies in the tech industry and beyond" — and that recently Google announced plans to factor in-person attendance into its performance reviews. "Overnight, workers' professionalism has been disregarded in favor of ambiguous attendance tracking practices tied to our performance evaluations," Chris Schmidt, a software engineer at Google and member of the grassroots Alphabet Workers Union, told CNN in a statement. "The practical application of this new policy will be needless confusion amongst workers and a disregard for our various life circumstances... " Schmidt said that even if you go into the office, there's no guarantee you'll have people on your team to work with or even a desk to sit at. "Many teams are distributed, and for some of us there may not be anyone to collaborate with in our physical office locations," Schmidt said. "Currently, New York City workers do not even have enough desks and conference rooms for workers to use comfortably." A Google spokesperson countered that its policy of working in the office three days a week is "going well, and we want to see Googlers connecting and collaborating in-person, so we're limiting remote work to exception only...." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What Role Will NASA Play In Developing ISRU On The Moon?

Space agencies will play a vital role in the developing space economy, especially in the beginning. But what will the part of the biggest of all space agencies be when considering how space resources, especially those on the Moon, are accessed? NASA has a plan for that as it does for so many other things … Continue reading "What Role Will NASA Play In Developing ISRU On The Moon?" The post What Role Will NASA Play In Developing ISRU On The Moon? appeared first on Universe Today.

Inno3D Hides Power Port On New RTX 4070, RTX 4060 Ti GPUs

MyDrivers reports that Inno3D has developed a unique design to hide the power connectors on its upcoming GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards.

Parker Solar Probe Discovers Source of Solar Wind

The New York Times defines the solar wind as "a million-miles-per-hour stream of electrons, protons and other charged particles rushing outward into the solar system." Now CNN reports that the Parker Solar Probe "has uncovered the source of solar wind." As the probe came within about 13 million miles (20.9 million kilometers) of the sun, its instruments detected fine structures of the solar wind where it generates near the photosphere, or the solar surface, and captured ephemeral details that disappear once the wind is blasted from the corona...A study detailing the solar findings was published Wednesday in the journal Nature... There are two types of this wind. The faster solar wind streams from holes in the corona at the sun's poles at a peak speed of 497 miles per second (800 kilometers per second)... The spacecraft's data revealed that the coronal holes act like showerheads, where jets appear on the sun's surface in the form of bright spots, marking where the magnetic field passes in and out of the photosphere. As magnetic fields pass each other, moving in opposite directions within these funnels on the solar surface, they break and reconnect, which sends charged particles flying out of the sun. "The photosphere is covered by convection cells, like in a boiling pot of water, and the larger scale convection flow is called supergranulation," said lead study author Stuart D. Bale, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement. "Where these supergranulation cells meet and go downward, they drag the magnetic field in their path into this downward kind of funnel. The magnetic field becomes very intensified there because it's just jammed. It's kind of a scoop of magnetic field going down into a drain. And the spatial separation of those little drains, those funnels, is what we're seeing now with solar probe data." Parker Solar Probe detected highly energetic particles traveling between 10 and 100 times faster than the solar wind, leading the researchers to believe that the fast solar wind is created by the reconnection of magnetic fields. "The big conclusion is that it's magnetic reconnection within these funnel structures that's providing the energy source of the fast solar wind," Bale said. "It doesn't just come from everywhere in a coronal hole, it's substructured within coronal holes to these supergranulation cells. It comes from these little bundles of magnetic energy that are associated with the convection flows." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Minisforum's New PC Has Intel's Arc GPU, Quad-Fan Cooling

Minisforum's Neptune NH2673 is not so mini, but it can be used for gaming.

New Spider-Man Movie Features Lego Scene Made By 14-Year-Old

Isaac-Lew (Slashdot reader #623) writes: The Lego scene in "Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse" was animated by a 14-year-old high school student after the producers saw the trailer he made that was animated Lego-style. The teenager had used his father's old computers to recreate the trailer "shot for shot to look as if it belonged in a Lego world," reports the New York Times: By that point, he had been honing his skills for several years making short computer-generated Lego videos. "My dad showed me this 3-D software called Blender and I instantly got hooked on it," he said. "I watched a lot of YouTube videos to teach myself certain stuff..." [A]fter finding the movie's Toronto-based production designer, Patrick O'Keefe, on LinkedIn, and confirming that Sony Pictures Animation's offer was legitimate, Theodore Mutanga, a medical physicist, built his son a new computer and bought him a state-of-the-art graphics card so he could render his work much faster... Over several weeks, first during spring break and then after finishing his homework on school nights, Mutanga worked on the Lego sequence... Christophre Miller [a director of "The Lego Movie" and one of the writer-producers of "Spider-Verse."] saw Mutanga's contribution to "Across the Spider-Verse" not only as a testament to the democratization of filmmaking, but also to the artist's perseverance: he dedicated intensive time and effort to animation, which is "not ever fast or easy to make," Miller said. 'The Lego Movie' is inspired by people making films with Lego bricks at home," Lord said by video. "That's what made us want to make the movie. Then the idea in 'Spider Verse' is that a hero can come from anywhere. And here comes this heroic young person who's inspired by the movie that was inspired by people like him." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple M2 Ultra Graphics Outpaces RTX 4070 Ti in Early Compute Benchmarks

In early compute benchmarks, Apple's M2 Ultra chip appears to perform somewhere between an RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4080 in Geekbench 6 and GFXBench testing.

LG 32-Inch UHD IPS Monitor Now Just $349 at Best Buy

The LG 32UN650-W is available today for a new low price at Best Buy, going from $400 down to $349.

Intel Open Sources New 'One Mono' Font for Programmers

Intel has announced Intel One Mono, a new font catering to "the needs of developers" with an "expressive" monospace for clarity and legibility" It's easier to read, and available for free, with an open-source font license. Identifying the typographically underserved low-vision developer audience, Frere-Jones Type designed the Intel One Mono typeface in partnership with the Intel Brand Team and VMLY&R, for maximum legibility to address developers' fatigue and eyestrain and reduce coding errors. A panel of low-vision and legally blind developers provided feedback at each stage of design. The Linux blog OMG! Ubuntu calls the new font "pretty decent," adding that "Between IBM Plex Mono, Hack, Fira Code, and JetBrains Mono I think we Linux users are spoilt for choice when it comes to open-source monospace fonts that look good and work great. "Still, there's always room for more, right...?" Better yet, it's not only free to download and use but free to edit, and free to redistribute... Overall, I think Intel One Mono looks great, especially in a text editor (GUI or CLI). There's a noticeable upper and lower margin to the font that in dense text situations allows text to breathe, but in some terminal tools, like Neofetch, the gaps can seem a bit too happy. The Intel One Mono repository on GitHub includes instructions for activating the font in VSCode and Sublime Text, and lists some extra features accessible in some applications and via CSS: There is an option for a raised colon, either applied contextually between numbers or activated generally. Superior/superscript and inferior/subscript figures are included via their Unicode codepoints, or you can produce them from the default figures via the sups (Superscript), subs (Subscript), and si (Scientific Inferior) features. Fraction numerals are similarly available via the numr (Numerator) and dnom (Denominator) features. A set of premade fractions is also available in the fonts. Read more of this story at Slashdot.