• Two more long-lost Doctor Who episodes have been rediscovered decades after they first aired.  (BBC)
  
  The two episodes are from the sprawling 12-episode story The Dalek Master Plan that aired in Britain in 1965 - and never aired anywhere else because Australian censors deemed it too violent and that made it unprofitable to resell in smaller markets.
  
  And then the BBC, in the long tradition of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, wiped the tapes to reuse them, deeming the tapes themselves more valuable than their contents.
  
  Which left little hope because most of the episodes rediscovered over the years have been from the archives of channels elsewhere in the world that "accidentally" held on to copies for decades after their rights expired.
  
  These two episodes were left to a film archiving foundation as part of a "ramshackle" private collection.
  
  In a nice touch, one of the actors who appeared as the Doctor's companion in the story - Peter Purves, now 87 - was invited to the screening, but only told that it was for an interview.  To be fair, they did interview him afterwards.
  
  
  
• Yes, it's a quiet news day.

• The CEO of Adobe will be stepping down after 18 years of delighting investors and pissing off customers.  (CNBC)
  
  Mostly because lately he's been pissing off customers and investors in equal measure.
  
  
  
• Italian prosecutors want to proceed to trial against Amazon on charges of tax evasion even after the company settled with the Italian revenue agency.  (Reuters)
  
  Tread carefully.  Amazon does have space lasers, even if not quite so many as Twitter.
  
  
  
• No, you can't phone a friend.  (BBC)
  
  Not when you're a witness in a case in Britain's High Court.
  
  And not when you claim that the number called by the smart glasses you were wearing at the time was for a taxi driver.
  
  
  
• Before quantum computing arrives, this startup wants enterprises already running on it.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Congratulations, Tech Crunch.  This level of incoherence is worthy of The Verge.
  
  
  
• A study conducted by a studio creating a game with AI-powered NPCs claims 96% of players enjoy AI-powered NPCs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Well, first, Mandy Rice Davies applies.
  
  And second, NPCs are AI-powered by definition.
  
  
  
• Nvide claims future GPUs will bring a million-fold performance increase in path-tracing.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Mostly by not performing path tracing.  And the comparison is against ten year old hardware that also didn't perform path tracing.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, March 14 2026 06:25 PM (zCiG7)

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