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Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

 
Suicide Squad director David Ayer defends his...
DC Extended Universe auteur Zack Snyder may have gotten the chance to release his original version of Justice League back in 2021, but a similar opportunity has not yet been extended to Suicide Squad director David Ayer. The filmmaker’s 2016 comic book movie was, like Snyder’s Justice League, heavily tampered with behind the scenes, and Ayer has remained adamant that the version of Suicide Squad that was theatrically released differs greatly from his original, preferred iteration. The ongoing wait...

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You Asked: soundbar space woes and best...
Table of Contents On today’s You Asked: What if your soundbar blocks the bottom of your TV? What’s the best, biggest TV I would personally buy for $5,000? What’s the best-sounding bedroom TV for dialogue clarity? When you need more soundbar space Chris Hagan / Digital Trends Peter from Prague currently has an older 32-inch TV with a central pedestal stand sitting atop his Blu-ray player. That arrangement allows for the five inches of clearance needed to accommodate their...

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Apple’s next smart home adventure could be...
In the wake of canceling its hyped car project, a hard setback with an iPhone subscription service, and delays with AI feature rollout, it seems Apple has found a new sweet spot for product development in the smart home segment. According to Bloomberg, the company is working on a smart doorbell with Face ID authentication support. Apple is already rumored to be working on an iPad-like smart home device that will serve as a home hub for other connected...

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Blake Lively sues her ‘It Ends With...
Blake Lively is filing a lawsuit against Justin Baldoni, her co-star and director on It Ends With Us, claiming that Baldoni sexually harassed her on set and that he engaged in a coordinated campaign to ruin her reputation. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Baldoni’s team fired back saying that the lawsuit was “shameful” and that it contained “serious and categorically false accusations against Mr. Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios and its representatives.” Recommended Videos Things apparently got so bad during the filming...

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NYT Crossword: answers for Sunday, December 22
The New York Times has plenty of word games on its roster today — with Wordle, Connections, Strands, and the Mini Crossword, there’s something for everyone — but the newspaper’s standard crossword puzzle still reigns supreme. The daily crossword is full of interesting trivia, helps improve mental flexibility and, of course, gives you some bragging rights if you manage to finish it every day. While the NYT puzzle might feel like an impossible task some days, solving a crossword...

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The Price of Humiliating Nicolás Maduro
For many years, Venezuelans understood instinctively what was meant when someone invoked la situación in conversation. The rich started leaving the country because of la situación. One would be crazy to drive at night, given la situación del país. The main features of this “situation of the country,” in the years around President Hugo Chávez’s death in 2013, were an economy in free fall, empty supermarket shelves, and the normalization of new forms of criminality—such as “express kidnappings,” or...

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Mystery Drone Sightings Lead to FAA Ban...
It’s been a busy year in cybersecurity, but it’s not over yet. This week, we revealed how hackers figured out how to “jailbreak” digital license plates—which are legally issued in at least a couple of states and are valid across the US—allowing them to change the license plate number to basically anything. That means someone with this capability can avoid tolls and tickets, or even change their plate to be the same as their enemy. While the company that...

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Pairing live support with accurate AI outputs
In association withTP A live agent spends hours each week manually documenting routine interactions. Another combs through multiple knowledge bases to find the right solution, scrambling to piece it together while the customer waits on hold. A third types out the same response they’ve written dozens of times before. These repetitive tasks can be draining, leaving less time for meaningful customer interactions—but generative AI is changing this reality. By automating routine workflows, AI augments the efforts of live agents,...

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Enabling human-centric support with generative AI
In association withTP It’s a stormy holiday weekend, and you’ve just received the last notification you want in the busiest travel week of the year: The first leg of your flight is significantly delayed. You might expect this means you’ll be sitting on hold with airline customer service for half an hour. But this time, the process looks a little different: You have a brief text exchange with the airline’s AI chatbot, which quickly assesses your situation and places...

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Puzzle Corner
Ready for a fresh set of puzzles? Click here for the January/February Puzzle Corner, brought to you with a special Mystery Hunt twist by guest editor Dan Katz ’03. This column includes solutions to three September/October 24 problems. Find solutions to the other three problems here.

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Puzzle Corner September/October 2024 bonus solutions
Here are solutions for the three bonus problems that appeared in the September/October 2024 Puzzle Corner column we guest edited. Solutions for S/O2, S/O4, and S/O6 are below; those for S/O1, S/O3, and S/O5 can be found here. S/O2. Frank notes that a repunit Rk is a decimal integer consisting of the digit 1 repeated k times, with k > 0. For example, R1 = 1, R2 = 11, R3 = 111, etc. Let N be any integer not...

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South Korea’s Crisis Is Nowhere Near Over
The past two weeks in South Korean politics have featured enough twists to fill a Netflix K-drama. President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, shocking even some of his own advisers. In a late-night session, the national legislature overturned it. A few days later, the besieged president begged forgiveness from his people, while a corruption scandal engulfed the first lady. Legislators voted to impeach Yoon last weekend and suspend his powers, which have been transferred to a caretaker government...

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The Download: shaking up neural networks, and...
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The next generation of neural networks could live in hardware Networks programmed directly into computer chip hardware can identify images faster, and use much less energy, than the traditional neural networks that underpin most modern AI systems. That’s according to work presented at a leading machine learning conference in Vancouver last week. Neural networks, from GPT-4 to...

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Bashar al-Assad Exploited Alawites’ Fear
For decades, the Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad built his power on a single, relentless narrative of survival: The regime presented itself as the only shield against annihilation for the Alawites, the ethno-religious minority that makes up about a tenth of Syria’s population and has long understood itself to be threatened by the country’s Sunni majority. Supporting Assad, himself an Alawite, was a matter not of loyalty or politics for this community, the regime insisted, but of choosing between existence...

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