Month: February 2016

Last month when Oculus announced the surprising $599 price for its Rift virtual reality headset, the company also promised upcoming bundles that would include the Rift and a PC that has been certified as "Oculus Ready." Today, Oculus revealed details of the first branded PCs in that Oculus Ready line, which will be available for pre-order starting at $1,499 when bundled with a Rift headset.

At the low end of the line, the ASUS G11CD, Alienware X51 R3, and Dell XPS 8900 SE all barely squeak by with Oculus' minimum required specs for the Rift. Those low-end Oculus Ready towers all sport an Nvidia GTX 970 graphics card, 8GB of RAM, and Intel i5 processors and sell for $1,499 to $1,599 when bundled with a Rift.

At the high end of the line, the Oculus Ready Alienware Area 51 has an Nvidia GTX 980, 16GB of RAM, and an i7 processor for a whopping $2,549 MSRP (and that's before you purchase the Rift). Asus and Alienware also offer a few Oculus Ready options somewhere in the middle of the price/power continuum.

The F-35 program will be cut by 45 aircraft over the next 10 years as the Air Force struggles with its spending priorities, according to an Air Force document.

A prematurely posted copy of the US Air Force's fiscal year 2017 budget request was pulled down from the service's website today but not before defense analysts and journalists were able to download the document and find a number of surprises. While it had been previously announced by the Department of Defense that five fewer F-35A fighters would be purchased in 2017, the plan outlined in the 2017 Air Force budget would cut even more F-35s from purchase plans over the next 10 years, deferring the purchase of 45 planes until later.

In a statement introducing the budget plans, Air Force officials wrote, "The Air Force is facing a modernization bow wave in critical nuclear and space programs over the next ten years that, under current funding levels, we simply cannot afford." A recent assessment of the Air Force's nuclear forces reinforced calls for a major investment in modernization of systems, some of which have been in place with few modifications since the 1970s and 1980s.

The F-35 program, one of the Air Force's most expensive procurements, has been cut back as a result as the Air Force instead proposes a budget that "restores some capacity in the short-term, funds readiness to executable levels, and makes additional investments in nuclear, space, cyber, command and control (C2), and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities," according to the introductory statement.

The San Francisco 49ers take on the Denver Broncos in action from a 2010 game in London. (credit: Mark Botham)

The National Football League, one of the largest funders of brain research in the country, has subtly worked to influence research efforts and downplay the link between brain disease and the beloved sport, a new report by ESPN's Outside the Lines alleges.

On the surface, the league and its partners appear to altruistically support scientific studies on the effects of hard-hitting sports, such as football, donating more than $100 million to brain research efforts that may not otherwise have been supported. Behind the scenes, however, the organization has tried to funnel the money back to NFL-affiliated scientists and reneged on contributions when researchers came up with discomforting data, the investigation finds.

In light of the funding environment, some brain researchers have compared the NFL’s actions to those of Big Tobacco in the days when the cigarette makers spent millions of dollars to buy off researchers and fund studies that denied links between smoking and serious health effects.

(credit: flickr user: Pieter Bas Elskamp)

A paper in Monday's issue of PNAS reports that sleep-deprived people are up to 4.5 times more likely to sign a false confession. There’s an important weakness in the experiment, however, in that participants didn’t face any penalty for signing the confession. But the study does tie in with other evidence suggesting that specific interrogation practices can lead to false confessions, so it may be an important chunk of pixels in an emerging picture.

As it stands, there's evidence that sleep deprivation interferes with people's ability to make rational decisions. There's also evidence that most false confessions are signed after interrogations that lasted more than 12 hours. Taken together, these findings suggest that sleep deprivation could play a role in how an interrogation turns out but doesn't tell us anything about whether this does happen.

The PNAS paper suggests that sleepier people may be more likely to falsely confess but that people's individual characteristics also play a role: people who show a more impulsive decision-making approach are more likely to sign.

(credit: Orin Zebest / Flickr)

A major game piracy group says it will cease releasing any its DRM- and copy protection-stripping cracks for the next year, ostensibly to examine whether or not its efforts have any material effect on game sales. But there's little reason to expect this "experiment" to yield any useful results.

Torrentfreak reports that Chinese piracy collective 3DM has decided in an "internal meeting" not to crack any more single-player games as of the Chinese New Year, which was on February 8. Then, after a year spent away from the cracking scene, the group says it will "take a look at the situation... to see if genuine sales have grown."

That's an interesting idea, but it's hard to imagine 3DM's unilateral action having that much effect on legitimate game sales. After all, there are plenty of other active groups in the cracking "scene" that will try to fight to increase their own exposure by filling the hole left by 3DM. And even if every major cracking group collectively decided to take a break, some bored kids with debuggers and too much free time would no doubt step up to fill in the overwhelming demand for cracked games.

North Korean image purported to be of the launch of the Kwangmyŏngsŏng-4 satellite (though it may actually be of an earlier launch).

On Sunday, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) launched a rocket carrying a satellite into orbit despite protests from neighboring countries and the US that it is a violation of previous agreements on missile testing. The Kwangmyŏngsŏng-4 satellite, an "earth observation satellite" ostensibly for monitoring agricultural output, apparently reached orbit. But the satellite is apparently tumbling out of control, according to a US Department of Defense official.

Meanwhile, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday morning, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that intelligence has confirmed that North Korea has resumed production of plutonium at a reactor in Yongbyon. The regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had announced the return to production operations in September of 2015. Clapper said that "North Korea has been operating the reactor long enough so that it could begin to recover plutonium from the reactor's spent fuel in a matter of weeks to months."

The launch, the renewed plutonium production, and the test last month of a "boosted" nuclear warhead (which North Korea claimed was a hydrogen bomb) have all been seen as evidence that North Korea is moving forward with development of nuclear ballistic missiles that could potentially reach the west coast of the United States. Timed both to coincide with lunar new year celebrations and the Super Bowl in the US, the Kwangmyŏngsŏng-4 satellite flew over the San Francisco Bay area just an hour after the end of Super Bowl 50.