Month: December 2015

(credit: Ian Kennedy)

Update (12a, Saturday 12/12): An appeals court in New York has issued an emergency stay of a lower-court's ruling that daily fantasy sports sites FanDuel and DraftKings must shut down their New York operations. “The day has ended well and now New Yorkers who love daily fantasy sports can continue to play,” Randy Mastro, DraftKings’ attorney, told the Washington Post. “The takeaway from today is these are legal questions that deserve a full airing. We believe that when we have our full day in court, we will prevail.”

Original story: On Friday, New York Supreme Court Judge Manuel Mendez ruled that FanDuel and DraftKings—two daily fantasy sports websites—must cease operations in New York, at least as long as the two companies are embroiled in a legal dispute with the state attorney general over whether their businesses constitute an illegal lottery.

State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has maintained that the two sites promote daily betting on fantasy sports and advertise their services as a path to easy money. Although both New York-based FanDuel and Boston-based DraftKings have been operating for a number of years, the two sites have garnered attention this fall for their aggressive marketing campaigns, especially during National Football League games.

Microsoft will be giving back some, but not all, of the OneDrive storage that it was planning to take away from users of its cloud storage service.

In early November, the company made a surprising announcement to OneDrive users in two parts. First, the unlimited storage that came with Office 365 subscriptions was being cut back to 1TB. Second, the free storage tier was cut from 15GB to 5GB, and the 15GB bonus that comes from syncing your camera roll with OneDrive was also removed.

The change was unsurprisingly unpopular. The OneDrive UserVoice site, used by Microsoft to solicit feature requests and feedback, quickly recorded a new top complaint: more than 70,000 votes for the storage to be reinstated, dwarfing every other suggestion on the site.

The touchscreen display described in the patent surrounds the dual thumbsticks and goes almost all the way to the controller's oval edge. (credit: US Patent Application 2015/0355768)

Nintendo has remained largely silent on its plans for its next console, codenamed NX, since the system was casually announced earlier this year. A newly published patent application from Nintendo, first filed in June, shows off one possible design: an innovative handheld that tightly integrates embedded analog sticks with a surrounding oval touchscreen that reaches to the very edge of the device.

Unlike the Wii U or the DS portables—which have small rectangular touchscreens placed between more traditional button-based controls on each side— the patent shows an elliptical touchscreen that dominates almost the entire front surface of the device, smartphone-style. The only break in that surface is two small holes on either side for "operation sticks" (read: analog thumbsticks) that extend deep into the controller. The tops of these clickable sticks sit nearly flush with the screen, letting players move their thumbs smoothly from analog controls to the touchscreen directly adjacent. (The patent also suggests the possibility of a 3DS-style parallax barrier display that allows for "stereoscopic view with naked eyes").

Other similar cutouts from the touchscreen surface could be included for buttons, "cross buttons," (read: d-pads), jog dials, etc., according to the patent, and shoulder buttons allow for further, traditional tactile input. The key is that all of these traditional controls would be embedded directly "within" the touchscreen via holes in the surface, rather than sitting off to the side in a separate plastic housing, as with existing Nintendo hardware.

(credit: Mya2ru/Wikimedia)

Despite recent efforts by health experts, doctors, and the Food and Drug Administration to pull the meat industry away from its heavy use of antimicrobials, livestock producers seem to have dug in their heels.

From 2009 to 2014, the amount of antimicrobials sold and distributed for use in livestock increased by 22 percent, according to an FDA report released Thursday. Of the antimicrobials sold in 2014, 62 percent were related to drugs used in human health, also called medically important. From 2009 to 2014, sale and distribution of medically important antimicrobials used on farms also jumped—an increase of 23 percent.

That brings the 2014 total of antimicrobials sold for US livestock to 15,358,210 kilograms, including 9,475,989 kilograms of medically important drugs, according to the report.

Net neutrality protest at the White House in November 2014. (credit: Stephen Melkisethian)

A group of tech companies has urged Congressional leadership to abandon a GOP plan to kill the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules.

Budget proposals have included provisions preventing the FCC from continuing to enforce the rules that took effect in June, at least until broadband providers have exhausted all of their appeals in court.

"We are writing to urge you to refrain from including riders relating to net neutrality and the Federal Communication Commission’s Open Internet Order in the upcoming omnibus spending legislation," the tech companies wrote in a letter Wednesday to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).