Month: March 2016

(credit: Adam Fagen)

The US Chamber of Commerce sued Seattle yesterday, objecting to that city's recent passage of a law allowing Uber and Lyft drivers to unionize.

It's the latest round in a growing battle over whether workers in the on-demand app economy should be treated as employees or independent contractors. The Chamber of Commerce lawsuit (PDF) says they're contractors and therefore can't unionize under the National Labor Relations Act. The Chamber claims that the Seattle law also violates the Sherman Antitrust Act.

"If allowed to stand, Seattle's Ordinance would threaten one of the most vibrant, cutting edge sectors of the economy," Chamber lawyers write. With 40,000 local governments in the US, thousands of "separate and independent collective bargaining regimes" could "undermine the flexibility, efficiency, and choice that accompany independent driver arrangements."

Long live the new streaming media regime. (credit: Videodrome)

There is a growing chasm between people who watch broadcast TV and those who watch streaming shows. Consider that in 2015, Netflix subscribers watched CBS shows 42 percent less than non-subscribers. That means nearly half of Netflix subscribers have just stopped watching CBS. Netflix subscribers also watched Fox 35 percent less, ABC 32 percent less, and NBC 27 percent less.

These numbers come from a new report released by Michael Nathanson of research firm MoffettNathanson. Nathanson is tracking shifts in TV viewership over time, and he estimates that 2015 saw a 3 percent drop in TV viewing. This is part of an overall trend that saw a precipitous decline in TV viewership in 2014, combined with a corresponding rise in subscriptions to streaming services. In an attempt to keep up with these changes, most networks are now using a new Nielsen ratings metric called "live plus 7" or just "L7," which bases audience numbers on how many people watched the show—via DVR or streaming—within seven days after it aired live.

About half of last year's drop in network viewers was caused by Netflix, based on the company's claim that they streamed 29 billion hours of video in 2015. Those hours would account for about 6 percent of overall L7 viewing in the US last year, and it meant that Netflix took a solid bite out of overall viewership numbers. Nathanson predicts that Netflix will account for 14 percent of all TV viewing by 2020.

The SES-9 satellite is ready to go. Will we see a launch this evening? (credit: SpaceX)

Here we go again. Four times SpaceX has attempted to launch the SES-9 communications satellite, and four times the rocket company had to scrub. For today's launch attempt, at 6:35 pm ET (11:35pm UK) weather does not appear to be a constraint, so we will again be watching primarily for fuel-loading issues.

The most dramatic of the four scrubs came on Sunday when, just as the launch countdown reached zero, flight computers on board the rocket halted the launch due to a low thrust detection. Elon Musk, the company's chief executive, said that issue was partly due to a 35-minute delay caused by a boat that strayed into the safety zone off the coast of Florida.

With its new, more powerful variant of the Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX is having to handle this super-cold, dense propellant more carefully, and one of the things it is trying to do is deliver the right amount of fuel just before launch. Issues related to propellant loading caused the first two scrubs. The most recent scrub, on Tuesday, came due to high winds. SpaceX has been waiting for them to die down, and they now have.

Those were the days...

The annual orgy of game marketing and hype that is the Electronic Entertainment Expo will be a little less hype-filled this year, as some of gaming's biggest publishers have decided not to buy space on the Los Angeles Convention Center show floor.

VentureBeat reports today that Disney Interactive and Wargaming won't have booths at E3 2016. The two major publishers join Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts, which announced in recent weeks that they are also opting out of the show (though EA will have a press event and "hands-on" demos at an off-site location in the days before the show starts).

Wargaming, which has maintained a large E3 booth since 2011, summarized the reasons for its departure in an e-mail to Venturebeat. "From a strictly business perspective, E3 just doesn’t fit our current direction," a company spokesperson said. "It’s a show that is very centralized on retail product, and as a free-to-play digital download gaming company, we’ve realized that while the show may be a good fit for lots of other publishers and developers, it’s currently not a great fit for us."

The Google Posts landing page.

7 more images in gallery

There's a weird new feature popping up in Google search results called "Google Posts." It seems to be a place for Google to directly host content in a post-Google+ world and to embed this content directly into search results. Imagine orphaned Google+ posts with the Google+ branding stripped out, and you're most of the way there.

Over at Google.com/posts, Google has a landing page for this feature, calling it "an experimental new podium on Google" that allows you to "hear directly from the US presidential candidates in real time on Google." It's a believable explanation until you see this Google Posts profile from "Andrew Jewelers" in Buffalo, New York, (spotted by Mike Blumenthal), which is definitely not a presidential candidate.

The landing page says the "experimental" feature is "only available to the 2016 US presidential candidates" (Andrew Jewelers for president!), but those of us not running for office can join a waitlist as Google plans to "make it available to other prominent figures and organizations."

Enlarge (credit: NASA, ESA, P. Oesch (Yale University), G. Brammer (STScI), P. van Dokkum (Yale University), and G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz))

When did the first stars and galaxies form? The earliest thing we can see in the Universe is the Cosmic Microwave Background, created about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. The event that created the CMB filled the Universe with neutral hydrogen, which efficiently absorbs most of the wavelengths of light we would normally use to detect the first galaxies. But their light gradually reionized this neutral hydrogen, bringing an end to the Universe's "dark ages."

By the time reionization was complete, however, there was already substantial population of galaxies (not surprising, since they were caused by the reionization). So, how do we find the earliest galaxies?

In the case of new results announced this week, the authors used a combination of the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to identify a candidate galaxy that was exceptionally bright and distant. Then they used the absorption of light by all that neutral hydrogen to determine that it dates from only 400 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only three percent of its current age.

(credit: Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson)

The Samsung v. Apple saga is headed toward a fourth jury trial that's slated to begin in San Jose federal court at the end of this month. Lawyers for both companies have been filing a rapid succession of briefs, seeking to hammer out the final details of a trial that will recalculate damages for some Samsung phones found to infringe Apple patents.

US District Judge Lucy Koh has now weighed in on the parties' requests, publishing an order (PDF) on Wednesday barring Samsung's most surprising request. The company had asked (PDF) for Apple to be barred from mentioning that Samsung is a Korean corporation.

"Throughout both of the prior trials in this case, Apple has taken every opportunity to remind the jury of Samsung’s 'foreignness' by consistently referring to SEC as 'Samsung Korea,' 'Korean Samsung,' the 'Korean parent,' 'the Korean company,' and the 'Korean bosses' of 'Samsung America,'" Samsung lawyers wrote. "In fact, Apple’s counsel has rarely referred to SEC without mentioning Korea." They pointed out Koh herself had cited research about jury bias against foreign patent litigants. "Apple has no legitimate basis to offer any evidence or argument that evokes racial or national origin prejudice." Samsung lawyers also asked for Apple to be barred from referencing "the nationality or country of employment of Samsung witnesses."

Update: It's Memorial Day weekend here in the US, and the Ars staff has a long weekend accordingly. As we all reflect on the sacrifice of the people bravely serving in the Armed Forces, we thought resurfacing this piece—an homage to some of the finest aviation ever deployed by the US—would be a welcomed accompaniment. This story originally ran on March 4, 2016, and it appears unchanged below.

Roughly 110 years ago, one of the world's greatest aircraft designers—Clarence "Kelly" Johnson—was born in Ishpeming, Michigan. And since we're gigantic aviation nerds here at Ars Technica, the week of his birthday (February 27) is as good a reason as any to celebrate some of his legendary designs. Johnson spent 44 years working at Lockheed, where he was responsible for world-changing aircraft including the high-flying U-2, the "missile with a man in it" F-104 Starfighter, and the almost-otherworldly Blackbird family of jets.

In his career at Lockheed, Johnson's engineering acumen won him two Collier trophies, the most prestigious award one can win in the field of aeronautics (Lockheed chief engineer Hall Hibbard once famously said about Johnson, "That damn Swede can see air!"). In addition to being an excellent engineer, Johnson was also a powerfully effective manager; his practices running Lockheed's Advanced Design Projects unit are commonly regarded now as a master-class on how small focused groups should communicate and manage projects.