Month: December 2015

A drone crashed to Earth during a World Cup slalom ski race in Italy today, nearly hitting skier Marcel Hirscher. The drone belonged to a TV broadcast crew and carried a heavy camera on it.

Hirscher, a four-time defending overall World Cup champion, appeared not to notice the drone crash that happened just over his right shoulder as he came down the slope. He came in second on this particular downhill race, edged out by Henrik Kristoffersen of Norway. Hirscher maintains the lead in the competition overall.

WATCH: Skier almost crushed by falling drone during run. https://t.co/hyGYUJKTOc pic.twitter.com/dOlViauMLz

— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) December 22, 2015

Still, the 26-year-old Austrian skier sounded outraged by the time he spoke to the Associated Press. “This is horrible,” Hirscher said. "This can never happen again. This can be a serious injury.''

This week, Kim Dotcom tweeted this photo, with the tagline: "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!" (credit: Kim Dotcom)

On Tuesday afternoon (Wednesday, Auckland time) a New Zealand judge ordered that founder Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants should be extradited to the United States to face criminal charges over alleged massive copyright infringement on his now-shuttered site, Megaupload.

The judgement, which almost certainly will be appealed, sets the stage for the winding down of Dotcom’s tenacious years-long legal fight against the American judicial system.

As Ira Rothken, Dotcom's California-based lawyer, tweeted:

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

T-Mobile USA's recently instituted practice of downgrading video quality to 480p in order to reduce data usage now has a prominent critic: YouTube.

“Reducing data charges can be good for users, but it doesn’t justify throttling all video services, especially without explicit user consent,” a YouTube spokesperson said, according to a Wall Street Journal article today.

T-Mobile's "Binge On" program automatically reduces the quality of video while allowing many video services to stream without counting against customers’ high-speed data limits. Video services that cooperate with T-Mobile by meeting the company's "technical criteria" have their videos exempted from customers' data caps. Netflix, HBO, Hulu, and many others worked with T-Mobile to get the exemption.

Enlarge / An artist's concept depicts NASA's InSight Mars lander fully deployed for studying the deep interior of Mars. (credit: NASA)

One of 2016’s most anticipated space missions will have to be postponed more than two years—and might even be canceled—due to a faulty seismometer. The InSight lander was to have launched in March and studied the interior structure and geological processes on Mars, including Martian tectonic activity.

The seismometer itself worked fine, NASA officials said, but there was a problem with the 22cm sphere that creates a vacuum so that the instrument can function on the harsh surface of Mars. Three times this summer and fall the sphere leaked, and three times engineers thought they had fixed the problem. Then, on Tuesday, a fourth leak was confirmed. With the launch date looming and not enough time to address the issue, NASA scientists had to make a difficult decision.

“This just reflects the difficulty when you challenge scientists and engineers to do things they’ve never done before,” said John Grunsfeld, who leads NASA’s science mission directorate, in a teleconference with reporters. “Sometimes things don’t work out.”

The founding editor of Business Insider UK, Jim Edwards, had a bank delete two of his tweets today. In an e-mail, Bank of America told Edwards that his tweets violated the bank's copyright and that if he kept it up, they'd see to it that his Twitter account was deleted.

"Investment banks apparently have the power to censor journalists on Twitter, simply by asking," Edwards wrote in a short post on Business Insider describing the situation. "That is depressing."

Edwards had quoted a research document produced by analysts. He says the tweets were "probably trivial," but can't really be more specific—in part because the frequent Twitter user can't even remember exactly what they were about.

Enlarge / You're gonna need more basalt than that. (credit: Winam)

"The sooner you start socking away part of your paycheck for retirement, the easier it is to hit your goals. If you wait until late in your career to start, your goal could be simply out of reach unless you take a second job or win the lottery." That axiom is a bit like how we've treated carbon emissions: when governments started negotiating to limit greenhouse gases in the early 1990s, the agreed-upon goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius was pretty doable. The continued rise of emissions since then has turned that into a tall task, while the 1.5 degree Celsius aspiration added to the recent Paris agreement is even taller.

At this point, hitting those targets very likely requires more than just shifting away from fossil fuels. We’ll also need “negative emissions”—activities that absorb carbon dioxide from smokestacks or directly from the atmosphere—in order to squeeze under the line. It’s a simple concept but a very big challenge. Some nascent negative emission technologies exist, like capturing CO₂ from smokestacks and pumping it into underground reservoirs. Other proposals, however, sound pretty wild and may not work—like dumping iron dust into the oceans to spur plankton growth.

One tempting strategy is to imitate nature’s longterm carbon control—the weathering of fresh rock. When certain minerals react with CO₂ in rainwater, they turn into different minerals, and the CO₂ turns into bicarbonate that ends up in groundwater, rivers, and ultimately the ocean.

Peter Sunde, co-founder of the Pirate Bay and digital artist.

Peter Sunde, co-founder of the Pirate Bay, is out of jail and back with a new project whose entire goal is to screw the music industry. It's called the Kopimashin, and it lives to make copies of the Gnarls Barkely song "Crazy."

All it took was a Raspberry Pi and some Python code, and now the Kopimashin is making 100 copies of "Crazy" every second. Sunde posted about the device on Konsthack, a site devoted to art and hacking. He writes, "The Kopimashins lcd display consists of three rows of information, the serial number of the mashin, amount of copies created and the dollar value it represents in losses for the record labels (Downtown Records / Warner Music), currently represented by USD 1,25 per copied piece." Each copy is "stored" in /dev/null, which is to say, it is not stored at all (/dev/null is a nonexistent "null device"). The point, Sunde says, is "to make the audio track the most copied in the world and while doing so bankrupting the record industry."

Sunde hasn't made the source code available yet. As he told Ars via -mail: "It’s really simple, it’s ugly code and I have no energy to clean it up for the 'helpful' community to make the code 1% faster — and it’s about making a point, not the code itself. If you want to build your own, just start a terminal, find a song to copy and do: while true; do cat file.mp3 >/dev/null; done."