Amazon's physical retail business is suffering a major blow as the company today confirmed it will close 68 brick-and-mortar retail stores across the U.S. and U.K. From a report: This includes its Amazon Books bookstores, its pop-up shops in various markets, and its 4-star stores where customers could shop popular and highly-rated products across Amazon.com. The retailer, which began its life as an online bookseller, launched its first physical bookstore in Seattle back in 2015, then steadily expanded its brick-and-mortar footprint to include more locations across the U.S. and abroad, including in U.S. states like Arizona, California, Colorado, D.C., Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregan, Tennessee, Texas, and of course, its home state of Washington.

Slashdot reader XXongo writes: Astra is trying to make some of the smallest launch vehicles in history. But their most recent launch of their Rocket 3 vehicle had an unusual failure, where the second stage seemed to get stuck inside the booster stage. Hackaday analyzes the failure.
From Hackaday's article: The structure, engines, avionics, and useful payload of a rocket only make up a tiny portion of its liftoff mass, while the rest is dedicated to the propellant it must expend to reach orbital velocity. That's why a Falcon 9 tipping the scales at 549,054 kilograms (1,207,920 pounds) can only loft a payload of 22,800 kg (50,265 lb) — roughly 4% of its takeoff weight. As you might imagine, there's a lower limit where there simply isn't enough mass in the equation for the hardware necessary to build a fully functional rocket. But where is that limit? That's precisely what aerospace newcomer Astra is trying to find out. Their Rocket 3 is among the smallest orbital boosters to ever fly, closer in size and mass to the German V2 of World War II than the towering vehicles being built by SpaceX or Blue Origin. Even the Rocket Lab Electron, itself an exceptionally svelte rocket, is considerably larger.

The reason they're trying to build such a small rocket is of course very simple: smaller means cheaper.... Such a low ticket price would have been unfathomable a decade ago, and promises to shake up an already highly competitive commercial launch market. But naturally, Astra has to get the thing flying reliably before we can celebrate this new spaceflight milestone....

[R]ather than placing just the payload into a protective aerodynamic fairing, the entire second stage needs to be enclosed. The lower portion of the second stage is tucked into the hollow interstage, and an elongated fairing makes sure the payload and its ride to space aren't exposed to supersonic airflow in the early phases of flight.... Looking at the live video from the February 11th launch, we can clearly see the chain of events that led to the upper stage losing control and ultimately failing to enter orbit. At almost exactly three minutes into the flight the payload fairing visibly shudders, but fails to open. Four seconds later the second stage, propelled forward by a spring-loaded mechanism, slams into the fairing but fails to knock it lose. Finally, at three minutes and eleven seconds into the mission, the second stage's engine ignites while still inside the interstage. This build up of pressure blows off the fairing, but unfortunately also destabilizes the second stage and sends it tumbling.
One of Astra's earlier low-cost rockets actually began its launch by travelling sideways. And Hackaday now notes that this month's mission "ended in a total loss of the vehicle and payload when the upper stage tumbled out of control roughly three minutes after an otherwise perfect liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida." But they also add an encouraging note.

"Such issues aren't uncommon for a new orbital booster, and few rockets in history have entered regular service without a lost payload or two on the books."

An anonymous reader shares a report: We often think of multiplication and division as calculations that need to be taught in school. But a large body of research suggests that, even before children begin formal education, they possess intuitive arithmetic abilities. A new study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience argues that this ability to do approximate calculations even extends to that most dreaded basic math problem -- true division -- with implications for how students are taught mathematical concepts in the future. The foundation for the study is the approximate number system (ANS), a well-established theory that says people (and even nonhuman primates) from an early age have an intuitive ability to compare and estimate large sets of objects without relying upon language or symbols. For instance, under this non-symbolic system, a child can recognize that a group of 20 dots is bigger than a group of four dots, even when the four dots take up more space on a page. The ability to make finer approximations -- say, 20 dots versus 17 dots -- improves into adulthood.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Three men pleaded guilty on Wednesday in a plot to attack power grids in the United States, which they believed could lead to economic and civil unrest and create the opportunity for white leaders to rise, federal prosecutors said. The men, Christopher Brenner Cook, 20, of Columbus, Ohio; Jonathan Allen Frost, 24, of West Lafayette, Ind., and of Katy, Texas; and Jackson Matthew Sawall, 22, of Oshkosh, Wis., each pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Columbus on Wednesday to one count of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. They will each face up to 15 years in prison when they are sentenced. A date has not been scheduled.

In fall 2019, Mr. Frost and Mr. Cook met in an online chat group, and they began talking about the possibility of attacking a power grid, according to plea agreements. Within weeks, the two men began making efforts to recruit others and began sharing reading material that promoted white supremacy and neo-Nazism. By late 2019, Mr. Sawall, a friend of Mr. Cook's, also joined the efforts, prosecutors said. As part of their plot, each man focused on substations in different regions of the country, and how to attack the power grids with rifles, according to court documents. The three men discussed that by knocking out power across the country for an extended period, civil unrest would spread, a race war could break out and the next Great Depression could be induced, according to court documents.

In February 2020, the three men met in Columbus for more talks about their plot, according to court documents. When they met, Mr. Frost gave Mr. Cook an AR-47, and the two men trained with the rifle at a shooting range, according to court documents. Mr. Frost also gave Mr. Cook and Mr. Sawall suicide necklaces that he had filled with fentanyl, which were to be ingested if they were caught by the police, according to court documents. While they were in Columbus, Mr. Sawall and Mr. Cook bought spray paint and used it to write the phrase "Join the Front" on a swastika flag under a bridge at a park, according to court documents. The men had more plans to spread propaganda while they were in Ohio until they encountered the police during a traffic stop, during which Mr. Sawall ingested his suicide necklace but survived, according to a plea agreement. The F.B.I. searched the homes of the three men in August 2020. Agents found multiple firearms, chemicals that could have been used to create an explosive device, and Nazi-related books and videos, according to court documents. Samuel Shamansky, a lawyer for Mr. Frost, said on Wednesday that Mr. Frost had "accepted complete responsibility for his reprehensible conduct."

"He has completely disavowed the racist viewpoints previously embraced," Mr. Shamansky said. "Regrettably, Mr. Frost fell prey to the misinformation espoused on the internet and now recognizes how dangerous the medium can be. Moreover, Mr. Frost has committed himself toward rehabilitation and doing everything within his power to remedy his misdeeds."

An anonymous reader shares a report: 2021 was a bad PR year for Big Tech. Lawmakers, advocates, and scholars filled pages of books and held hours of hearing exalting what they viewed as an industry being strangled by a handful of players using anti-competitive practices to solidify their position as kings. Ironically, those exact same tactics were vehemently opposed by the Big Tech companies themselves less than a decade ago. Like an aging punk throwing out their raggedy jean jacket for a blazer, Big Tech sold out. That's according to a new report by the Tech Oversight Project shared exclusively with Gizmodo. The report -- titled Whiplash: Inside Big Tech's Open Internet Flip-Flop -- lays out a laundry list of times where Big Tech companies have seemingly expressed support for many of the same policy goals they're currently fighting to quash. It also comes as Congress muses over several key pieces of antitrust legislation taking aim at Big Tech's alleged monopolistic business practices.

The report spotlights Google, Amazon, and Facebook's fierce defense of net neutrality in 2014 where the companies repeatedly cited an "open internet" as a critical component to innovation and economic growth. Tech's biggest players, as a New York Times article from the time states, "put their reputations and financial clout behind the challenge." These high-minded priorities for an open internet were shouted from the rooftops by Big Tech's most prominent voices at the time. "The internet has created this remarkable set of free markets, open competition, and competitive growth, and we need to keep it free and open," Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a 2007 address to the Progress and Freedom Foundation Aspen Summit.

"Proponents of AI audiobook narration tout its much lower production costs (compared to a traditional recording of a human narrator) as a way to improve profitability of audiobooks," reports Publisher's Weekly, "as well as allowing publishers to publish more audiobooks that have limited audiences.

"But according to actor and narrator Emily Lawrence, cofounder of the Professional Audiobook Narrators Association and president of its board of directors, 'It's very easy to reduce this issue to dollars and cents, but it's very complicated and nuanced.'" If AI narration proliferates, "it's not just narrators who will lose their jobs," Lawrence said. "There's an entire ecosystem of people who rely on audiobooks for their livelihood. People who direct audiobooks, people who edit audiobooks, people who check audiobook narration for word-for-word perfection against the manuscript.... Similarly, in audiobook narrator Hillary Huber's view, the negatives of AI outweigh any positives. She places "loss of livelihoods, loss of integrity in storytelling, and loss of personal connection" high on her list of concerns. "The only pros I see are financial," she said. "And it's the other team that benefits, not the narrators nor the listeners. Do you really think [AI company] Speechki is going to pass their savings on to the listener? No. Listeners make choices about what to spend money on, and they have a right to demand clear labeling of robot voices, as do authors....

[Anthony Goff, who until this month was senior v-p and publisher of Hachette Audio] noted at Hachette... his team is looking at using AI for some titles that have never been produced in audio before — a move that would help ensure that "the largest possible number of Hachette's titles are always accessible in audio format," he said. "Interest in previously unrecorded content would help us make decisions about what would make sense to bring to market as fully produced audiobook editions moving forward, created by a professional narrator and our dedicated production staff." Goff's experimentation lines up with the key point that those who champion AI narration raise: AI can provide publishers with a cost-effective way to produce more audiobooks to help meet burgeoning consumer demand. Industry statistics illustrate the gulf between the number of audiobooks that get to market and the number that could potentially be recorded. According to the most recent data from the Audio Publishers Association, more than 71,000 audiobooks were published in 2020. Though that number marks an industry high, it's still only a fraction of the number of print books published in 2020....

Despite AI narration's potential to help grow the audiobook sector, its emergence is "creating an existential crisis for our narrator community," Lawrence said. "It is not only threatening to take away our jobs and completely remove us from the equation but — and this is my main concern — it's threatening the art that we love. And as a community, we fully believe that what we do is art. Whether I'm out of a job or not, I would be devastated that the art that I care so deeply about is so horribly compromised."

joshuark writes: Microsoft has filed an amicus brief supporting Epic Games in its appeal against Apple, and argues that, "the potential antitrust issues stretch far beyond gaming." As Epic Games continues to file its appeal against the 2021 ruling that chiefly favored Apple, interested parties have been contributing supporting filings to the court. Notably, those have included US attorneys general, but now Microsoft has also joined in on the side of Epic Games. Microsoft's amicus filing included below, sets out what it describes as its own "unique -- and balanced -- perspective to the legal, economic, and technological issues this case implicates." As a firm which, like Apple, sells both hardware and software, Microsoft says it "has an interest" in supporting antitrust law. Describing what it calls Apple's "extraordinary gatekeeper power," Microsoft joins Epic Games in criticizing alleged errors in the original trial judge's conclusions. "Online commerce and interpersonal connection funnels significantly, and sometimes predominantly, through iOS devices," says Microsoft. "Few companies, perhaps none since AT&T... at the height of its telephone monopoly, have controlled the pipe through which such an enormous range of economic activity flows." To support its claim that the Epic Games vs Apple ruling has "potential antitrust issues [that] stretch far beyond gaming," Microsoft describes what else it sees as this "enormous range of economic activity." "Beyond app distribution and in-app payment solutions - the adjacent markets directly at issue in this case," says Microsoft's filing, "Apple offers mobile payments, music, movies and television, advertising, games, health tracking, web browsing, messaging, video chat, news, cloud storage, e-books, smart-home devices, wearables, and more besides."

An anonymous reader writes: Ransomware is driving developer interest in cybersecurity while the Internet of Things and games development has spurred more interest in 35-year-old programming language C++, according to O'Reilly Media's 2021 learning platform analysis. However, it could the case that developers are looking at some newer languages to give them the edge. O'Reilly, a developer-focused education content provider, creates an analysis of search terms and content modules consumed on its learning platform each year to reveal developer trends. Content usage is an aggregate measurement of "units viewed" across all forms, including online-training courses, books, videos, online conferences, and other products.

The topic of cybersecurity has grown significantly on the platform, likely as a result of the high-profile ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, and software supply chain attacks on customers of SolarWinds and IT management firm Kaseya. Content usage on ransomware grew 270% over the past year, according to O'Reilly, while privacy grew 90%, identity was up 50%, and application security was up 45%. Developers building Internet of Things products and games are boosting interest in the C++ programming language. Software quality firm Tiobe has also noted a recent surge in interest in C++. While interest in C++ did see a noteworthy rise, Python and Java still dominate O'Reilly's platform usage. O'Reilly says it has seen usage of content about Mozilla-hatched Rust and Google-backed Go "growing rapidly." Both are popular for systems and infrastructure programming. Rust in particular is being used in place of C++ to help avoid memory-related security issues. It's being used at Microsoft, AWS and Google, and has been positioned as the second official language for the Linux kernel.

XKCD creator Randall Munroe has announced his latest science book: What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, which will delve into new out-of-the-box questions that Munroe attempts to answer with hard scientific facts and research. From a report: What If? 2 follows 2014's original What If? book -- which itself was borne out of an XKCD spinoff blog -- that saw Munroe examine absurd questions (like whether you could build a jetpack that ran off downward-facing machine guns or if there's enough paint to cover the entire surface of the earth) with rigorous scientific accuracy, accompanied by Munroe's signature stick figure comics. The new volume will continue in What If?'s absurd scientific footsteps, attempting to answer new questions from readers like how you'd ride a fire pole from the moon to Earth, or what would happen if you tried to build a billion-story-high building or solve global warming by having everyone on earth open their freezer doors.

"GIF folders were used by ancient civilisations as a way to store and catalogue animated pictures that were once employed to convey emotion," Vice writes: Okay, you probably know what a GIF folder is — but the concept of a special folder needed to store and save GIFs is increasingly alien in an era where every messaging app has its own in-built GIF library you can access with a single tap. And to many youngsters, GIFs themselves are increasingly alien too — or at least, okay, increasingly uncool. "Who uses gifs in 2020 grandma," one Twitter user speedily responded to Taylor Swift in August that year when the singer-songwriter opted for an image of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson mouthing the words "oh my god" to convey her excitement at reaching yet another career milestone.

You don't have to look far to find other tweets or TikToks mocking GIFs as the preserve of old people — which, yes, now means millennials. How exactly did GIFs become so embarrassing? Will they soon disappear forever, like Homer Simpson backing up into a hedge...?

Gen Z might think GIFs are beloved by millennials, but at the same time, many millennials are starting to see GIFs as a boomer plaything. And this is the first and easiest explanation as to why GIFs are losing their cultural cachet. Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication at Syracuse University and author of multiple books on internet culture, says that early adopters have always grumbled when new (read: old) people start to encroach on their digital space. Memes, for example, were once subcultural and niche. When Facebook came along and made them more widespread, Redditors and 4Chan users were genuinely annoyed that people capitalised on the fruits of their posting without putting in the cultural work. "That democratisation creates a sense of disgust with people who consider themselves insiders," Phillips explains. "That's been central to the process of cultural production online for decades at this point...."

In 2016, Twitter launched its GIF search function, as did WhatsApp and iMessage. A year later, Facebook introduced its own GIF button in the comment section on the site. GIFs became not only centralised but highly commercialised, culminating in Facebook buying GIPHY for $400 million in 2020. "The more GIFs there are, maybe the less they're regarded as being special treasures or gifts that you're giving people," Phillips says. "Rather than looking far and wide to find a GIF to send you, it's clicking the search button and typing a word. The gift economy around GIFs has shifted...."

Linda Kaye, a cyberpsychology professor at Edge Hill University, hasn't done direct research in this area but theorises that the ever-growing popularity of video-sharing on TikTok means younger generations are more used to "personalised content creation", and GIFs can seem comparatively lazy.
The GIF was invented in 1987 "and it's important to note the format has already fallen out of favour and had a comeback multiple times before," the article points out. It cites Jason Eppink, an independent artist and curator who curated an exhibition on GIFs for the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2014, who highlighted how GIFs were popular with GeoCities users in the 90s, "so when Facebook launched, they didn't support GIFs.... They were like, 'We don't want this ugly symbol of amateur web to clutter our neat and uniform cool new website." But then GIFs had a resurgence on Tumblr.

Vice concludes that while even Eppink no longer uses GIFs any more, "Perhaps the waxing and waning popularity of the GIF is an ironic mirror of the format itself — destined to repeat endlessly, looping over and over again."

Two-thirds of technology firms are experiencing a shortage of skilled workers, reports the BBC (citing a recent report from recruitment firm Harvey Nash).

But what's the solution? In an article shared by Chrisq, the BBC's business technology reporter field-tested some computer programming training: I attended Teach the Nation to Code, a free one-day Python coding workshop run by UK training firm, QA... But when it works, there's not much pay-off — just some lines on a screen. I also took classes with Cypher Coders and Creator Academy to teach me Scratch — a coding language for children with a simple visual interface... [I] found the step change from learning Scratch to Python similarly jarring in the children's toys — you suddenly go from colourful blocks to an empty screen with no handholding. What could help bridge this gap from fun games for kids, to more professional level complex coding?

Garry Law, founder of Australian coding training firm, Creator Academy, says IT education needs to be better. "We need to teach kids coding with visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning styles, and we need to adapt this learning method for adults, to attract more people to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)," he says....

Cost is also a big problem. According to Anna Brailsford, chief executive of social enterprise Code First: Girls, it typically costs £10,000 to learn coding and often there isn't a clear link between what is taught and the jobs available.
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo remembers that "the way I got started was by borrowing books from the library that contained example programs." Back then there were loads of books that were nothing but little BASIC apps for various machines. That got me started with a program that worked and often did something quite interesting or useful, like a graphical effect. Then I could tinker with it and learn that way.
But is that enough of a reward to attract new programmers — or should beginning courses target more learning styles? Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments.

Do we need better computer programming courses for visual learners?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Meta (AKA Facebook) researchers are working on [...] an AI that can learn capably on its own whether it does so in spoken, written or visual materials. The traditional way of training an AI model to correctly interpret something is to give it lots and lots (like millions) of labeled examples. A picture of a cat with the cat part labeled, a conversation with the speakers and words transcribed, etc. But that approach is no longer in vogue as researchers found that it was no longer feasible to manually create databases of the sizes needed to train next-gen AIs. Who wants to label 50 million cat pictures? Okay, a few people probably -- but who wants to label 50 million pictures of common fruits and vegetables?

Currently some of the most promising AI systems are what are called self-supervised: models that can work from large quantities of unlabeled data, like books or video of people interacting, and build their own structured understanding of what the rules are of the system. For instance, by reading a thousand books it will learn the relative positions of words and ideas about grammatical structure without anyone telling it what objects or articles or commas are -- it got it by drawing inferences from lots of examples. This feels intuitively more like how people learn, which is part of why researchers like it. But the models still tend to be single-modal, and all the work you do to set up a semi-supervised learning system for speech recognition won't apply at all to image analysis -- they're simply too different. That's where Facebook/Meta's latest research, the catchily named data2vec, comes in.

The idea for data2vec was to build an AI framework that would learn in a more abstract way, meaning that starting from scratch, you could give it books to read or images to scan or speech to sound out, and after a bit of training it would learn any of those things. It's a bit like starting with a single seed, but depending on what plant food you give it, it grows into an daffodil, pansy or tulip. Testing data2vec after letting it train on various data corpi showed that it was competitive with and even outperformed similarly sized dedicated models for that modality. (That is to say, if the models are all limited to being 100 megabytes, data2vec did better -- specialized models would probably still outperform it as they grow.)

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: Google marked what would've been Stephen Hawking's 80th birthday with a very special Doodle — an animated video in which the voice of Stephen Hawking speaks again, generated and used with the approval of the Hawking estate.

"My expectations were reduced to zero at 21. Everything since then has been a bonus," Hawking says in the video. "Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free. I have spent my life travelling across the universe, inside my mind."

In the video tribute, Stephen Hawking passes near a black hole on a model timeline of the universe. "We are very very small," he says. "But we are profoundly capable of very very big things.

"There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. However bad life may seem. While there is life, there is hope. Be brave, be curious, be determined, overcome the odds. It can be done."
"From colliding black holes to the Big Bang, his theories on the origins and mechanics of the universe revolutionized modern physics," explains the Google Doodles page, "while his best-selling books made the field widely accessible to millions of readers worldwide."

And Google's Arts and Culture blog shares a longer look at Stephen Hawking's life, including a 1979 photo of young Hawking at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University. "Because of Stephen Hawking's work, the radiation emitted by black holes is now called Hawking Radiation," the biography says at one point, also remembering Hawking's best-selling book A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.

But they also share some more personal memories: In 1990, with lifelong friend, the physicist Kip Thorne, Stephen approached the controversial notion of whether time travel is allowed by the laws of physics. To explore this hypothesis Stephen planned a party for time travellers. He wrote invitations, set a date, time and venue and provided precise GPS coordinates.

Stephen did not send out the invitations until after the party date was over. That way, only those who could genuinely travel back in time would know of it and be able to attend.

On the due day Stephen sat politely and waited. But no-one came. And that was the point. "I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible", he said afterwards. And the champagne went back on ice....
The biography closes with this quote from Stephen Hawking. "Remember to look up at the stars, and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe.

"Be curious, and however difficult life may seem there is always something you can do and succeed at; it matters that you don't just give up."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Cold War couldn't stop gaming from thriving in the Eastern Bloc. From the late 1980s through the early 1990s, a generation of young people living behind the Iron Curtain designed and released their own video games and arcade cabinets. Now, you can play English translations of some of these lost classics of early gaming. One is a text adventure where a Soviet military officer hunts and kills Rambo. The translated games all come from Slovakia and are a collaboration between the Slovak Game Developers Association and the Slovak Design Museum.

According to Stanislav Hrda, one of the programmers who created the games on offer, making video games was something only kids did. "The games were not sold in shops and the authors were not entitled to remuneration," he said in the post explaining the project. "Therefore, practically no one could engage in video game programming as a business activity, and adult programmers worked at most in state institutions on large mainframe computers. Thus, video game programmers became mainly teenagers." The computing power was limited and the teenagers' technological knowhow almost non-existent so many of these early games were text adventures. "These could also be programmed in the simpler Basic language that every home computer had built in," Hrda said. "Text-based games offered the opportunity to imprint one's fantasies into a world of characters, locations, descriptions of reality or fantasy at will. That is why hundreds of such video games were created in the 1980s in Czechoslovakia. The authors from the ranks of teenagers portrayed their friends, but also heroes from films that were distributed on VHS tapes or from the pop-cultural world of the West from the occasionally available comics, films, TV series and books."

Hrda loved American action movies and programmed the video game Satochin, a text adventure where a Soviet officer hunts John Rambo. "The game was very hard to win," Hrda told Ars Technica. "Whenever you made a small mistake, you would die. So before you win, you are killed ten times by Rambo." [...] The project has localized ten games for Western audiences, including Satochin, with plans to tackle more over the next few years. "The games translated over the next 2-3 years after the end of the project will represent almost the complete video game production from the period of 8-bit computers in Slovakia, with an emphasis on text adventure games," the site said. English versions are available here and can be played in the Fuse emulator. The Slovak versions can be played online through the project's website.

2021 saw record numbers of people checking out ebooks from libraries, reports the Boston Globe — 500 million, according to figures from the ebook-lending platform OneDrive.

But some Massachusetts lawmakers want to require publishers to make sure all their digital products are available to libraries — and at "reasonable terms" — because currently libraries pay much more than consumers: According to the American Library Association, libraries currently pay three to five times as much as consumers for ebooks and audiobooks. Thus, an ebook selling for $10 at retail could cost a library $50. In addition, the library can only buy the right to lend the book for a limited time — usually just two years — or for a limited number of loans — usually no more than 26. James Lonergan, director of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, believes that publishers settled on 26 checkouts after calculating that this is the number of times a printed book can be checked out before it's worn out and in need of replacement.

And that's what happens to a digital book after 26 checkouts. The library must "replace" it by paying full price for the right to lend it out 26 more times.

Lonergan admits that this approach makes a certain sense. Traditional printed books can only be borrowed by one user at a time, but in theory a digital book could be loaned to thousands of patrons at once. Also, printed books wear out and must be repurchased, but digital books last indefinitely. "You can't have a book be available forever at the same price point," Lonergan said. "The publishers need to make money." Lonergan thinks libraries and publishers can work out less expensive and more flexible terms. Publishers might charge a lower up-front cost for their digital products, for instance. Or they might expand the number of times libraries can lend out an ebook or audiobook. Lonergan believes that passing the Massachusetts law would give publishers further incentive to deal.

But the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which represents most of the nation's leading publishers, is ready to fight. An emailed statement from AAP said the Massachusetts bill "raises significant constitutional and federal copyright law concerns and is an unjustified intrusion into a vibrant and thriving market for ebooks and audiobooks that benefits authors and publishers, booksellers, libraries, and the general public."

The AAP has already sued in federal court to block enforcement of the Maryland law, arguing that only the federal government can regulate digital publishing practices.
The head of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners counters that if enough individual states pass ebook-pricing laws, "then Congress will step in and do something about this on the federal level."

Last night we asked what books you'd enjoyed reading this year.

Here's how Bill Gates had answered the same question on his personal blog Gates Notes: When I was a kid, I was obsessed with science fiction. Paul Allen and I would spend countless hours discussing Isaac Asimov's original Foundation trilogy. I read every book by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Heinlein. (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was a particular favorite.) There was something so thrilling to me about these stories that pushed the limits of what was possible.

As I got older, I started reading a lot more non-fiction. I was still interested in books that explored the implications of innovation, but it felt more important to learn something about our real world along the way. Lately, though, I've found myself drawn back to the kinds of books I would've loved as a kid.

My holiday reading list this year includes two terrific science fiction stories. One takes place nearly 12 light-years away from our sun, and the other is set right here in the United States — but both made me think about how people can use technology to respond to challenges. I've also included a pair of non-fiction books about cutting-edge science and a novel that made me look at one of history's most famous figures in a new light.

I read a lot of great books this year — including John Doerr's latest about climate change — but these were some of my favorites...
Gates' picks include a dystopian science fiction novel by nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro (Klara and the Sun) and Project Hail Mary. ("It requires a leap of faith, but it's got a lot of science in it...") The nonfiction titles included Walter Isaacson's book about CRISPR, The Code Breaker and Jeff Hawkins' A Thousand Brains.

Gates reveals his recommendations in a fanciful video where Christmas-y window displays include icons from his recommended books — including William Shakespeare.

What are some books that you read this year that you enjoyed reading? Doesn't have to be those that released this year -- though if possible, mention any recently published books.

Further reading: Ask Slashdot: What's a 2021 Movie or TV Show That You Enjoyed Watching?

An anonymous reader quotes a summary from Boing Boing, written by David Pescovitz: This year marked the 125th anniversary of the New York Times Book Review. To celebrate, the editors asked readers to nominate "the best book published" in those 125 years. They culled 200,000 ballots down to the top 25 most-nominated titles and called for a vote. The winner? Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Here are the four runners-up:

2. The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien
3. 1984 by George Orwell
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5 Beloved by Toni Morrison "Three writers -- John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner -- received nominations for seven of their books," reports the New York Times. "Other popular authors included James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood and Virginia Woolf, who each had five books nominated. And readers nominated four of Joan Didion's books: 'The Year of Magical Thinking,' 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem,' 'The White Album' and 'Play It as It Lays.'"

Would you agree with the number one pick? Is there a book worthy of this accolade that New York Times readers missed?

Two dozen theologians participated in a program funded partially by NASA to research how humans may react to news that intelligent life exists on other planets, according to one religious scholar who says he was recruited. From a report: The Rev. Dr. Andrew Davison, of the University of Cambridge, told the Times UK in a recent interview that he was among 23 other theologians in a NASA-sponsored program at the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton University from 2016 to 2017. Davison said he and his colleagues examined how each of the world's major religions would likely respond if they were made aware of the existence of aliens. His own work focused on the connection between astrobiology and Christian theology. Will Storrar, director of the CTI, said NASA wanted to see "serious scholarship being published in books and journals" addressing the "profound wonder and mystery and implication of finding microbial life on another planet," the Times reported.

[...] NASA's Astrobiology program provided partial funding through a grant to the CTI in 2015, with the agency-funded portion of the project concluding in 2017, a NASA spokesperson confirmed to Changing America. NASA was not directly involved in the selection of researchers for the study.

Cloudflare blog: Let's start with our Top Domains Ranking and 2021 brought us a very interesting duel for the Number 1 spot in our global ranking. Google.com (which includes Maps, Translate, Photos, Flights, Books, and News, among others) ended 2020 as the undefeated leader in our ranking -- from September to December of last year it was always on top. Back then TikTok.com was only ranked #7 or #8.

Top 10 -- Most popular domains (late) 2021

1 TikTok.com
2 Google.com
3 Facebook.com
4 Microsoft.com
5 Apple.com
6 Amazon.com
7 Netflix.com
8 YouTube.com
9 Twitter.com
10 WhatsApp.com

Top 10 -- Most popular domains (late) 2020

1 Google.com
2 Facebook.com
3 Microsoft.com
4 Apple.com
5 Netflix.com*
6 Amazon.com
7 TikTok.com
8 YouTube.com
9 Instagram.com *
10 Twitter.com

2021 told a different story. It was on February 17, 2021, that TikTok got the top spot for a day. Back in March, TikTok got a few more days and also in May, but it was after August 10, 2021, that TikTok took the lead on most days. There were some days when Google was #1, but October and November were mostly TikTok's days, including on Thanksgiving (November 25) and Black Friday (November 26).