Month: March 2016

(credit: Tidal)

John Emanuele, who plays in the ambient and electronic music group The American Dollar, has sued three different music streaming services in the past two weeks. Emanuele and his lawyers say that in different ways, Slacker Radio, Jay-Z's company Tidal, and now Google Play, have all ripped him off.

The lawsuits are all proposed class actions, as Emanuele's lawyers believe other artists have been cheated, too.

The complaint (PDF) against Tidal was filed on Saturday. It's received the most press attention, in part because Tidal's marketing is based on the idea that it will pay artists more generously than other streaming services. The lawsuit claims Tidal never served a "notice of intention," which is required to get the needed compulsory music license, and never paid the necessary royalties.

That's a big dish! The Arecibo radio telescope. (credit: NSF)

From nowhere, they appear as a sudden surge of power in the radio spectrum. Then, a few milliseconds later, they're gone—and as far as we could tell, they never come back. They've picked up the name "fast radio bursts," but nobody's entirely sure of what produces them. Follow-up observations have generally failed to find anything interesting in their direction, and the bursts didn't seem to repeat, leaving everyone who cares about these sorts of things a bit mystified.

One possible explanation for their one-time-only appearance would be that they're the product of a process that destroys the object that creates them. Thus, if they were produced by the collapse of a neutron star into a black hole (to give just one example), there'd be no way for that to happen twice.

But a new study suggests that at least one of them has repeated, which would take cataclysmic explanations off the table. There are enough differences between this burst and previously observed ones, however, to raise the question of whether there might be several processes producing similar surges in radio emissions.

Do not be afraid! Though it seems like you are underwater, you are not actually drowning. It is a virtual reality! (credit: Dr. Waldern/Virtuality Group)

Back in 2014, we were equal parts tickled and scared by the laundry list of legal-ese health warnings that accompanied the first consumer units of Samsung's Gear VR. The HTC Vive Pre comes with a booklet of Health and Safety Warnings that's largely similar, but HTC goes a bit further in warning about some surprisingly specific potential hazards of virtual reality.

The booklet includes the kind of boilerplate warnings you'd expect before using a device that requires physical activity: users should consult a doctor if they have a heart condition and/or are pregnant or elderly. But the Vive warnings booklet goes on to urge users with "psychiatric conditions (such as anxiety disorders or post-traumatic stress disorder)" to be cautious with the device:

"Content viewed using the product can be intense, immersive, and appear very life-like and may cause your brain and body to react accordingly. Certain types of content (e.g. violent, scary, emotional, or adrenaline-based content) could trigger increased heart rate, spikes in blood pressure, panic attacks, anxiety, PTSD, fainting, and other adverse effects. If you have a history of negative physical or psychological reactions to certain real life circumstances, avoid using the product to view similar content. (emphasis added)

That's not all that surprising, considering that doctors have been using virtual reality as an immersive PTSD treatment for years. Dr. Albert "Skip" Rizzo told Ars that even rudimentary, '90s-era VR was real enough for traumatized users to feel immersed in their memories:

Martin Smith

Detail of the Tortotubus fungus, which lived 440 million years ago in Sweden.

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Life oozed out of the seas onto land somewhere between 450 and 500 million years ago, but we have almost no fossils from this period on land. That may be about to change. A scientist in the UK believes he's identified the oldest terrestrial organism yet discovered, after careful analysis of 440-million-year-old microfossils gathered in Scotland and Sweden in the 1980s.

Durham University Earth scientist Martin Smith suggests in a new paper published in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society that a few fossilized filaments discovered in Scotland and Sweden are actually part of a root-like system used by fungus to gather nutrients from soil. They were long known as "problematic" fossils because nobody was sure what they were, nor where they fit into fungal evolution.

Smith identified the filaments as part of an ancient fungus called Tortotubus, which bears some resemblance to modern mushrooms—though we have no fossils that could prove that the fungus had fruiting bodies like mushrooms do.

(credit: Paramount/CBS)

When the Oregon legislature changed the state's tax rules last year, it was trying to convince Google Fiber to bring its high-speed Internet to Oregonians.

But lawmakers apparently didn't realize that the rule change would also hand a big tax break to Comcast. The new rule reduced property taxes for companies that offer gigabit-speed Internet service, which Google sells for $70 a month with no construction fees passed on to customers. But the rule change didn't specify that companies have to offer gigabit service at any particular price in order to qualify for the tax break. Comcast thus now qualifies for lowered property taxes because it offers 2Gbps Internet service, despite charging prices that would steer most ordinary customers to slower Internet speeds. Comcast's 2Gbps service costs $300 per month, with $1,000 in startup fees.

Rep. Phil Barnhart (D-Eugene) told utility regulators yesterday that the tax break was meant to spur investments in new networks and that legislators never considered that a company charging such high prices for gigabit service would get the tax break, according to The Oregonian. 

Leigh Anne Arthur. (credit: WYFF)

South Carolina news outlets are reporting a story about a Union County high school student who grabbed his teacher's phone, found nude pictures of her, and shared them with his friends. But it's the teacher—not the student—who's in hot water.

Union County High School teacher Leigh Anne Arthur says she left her phone on her desk for a few minutes while she went out on a routine patrol of the school's hallways. A 16-year-old student opened her phone, which wasn't protected with a password, and found pictures of Arthur that included shots of her partially undressed. The student used his own phone to take pictures of the partial nudes and send them around.

"He told the whole class that he would send them to whoever wanted them,” Arthur told TV station WSPA. The student who took the pictures "told me 'your day of reckoning is coming,'" she added.

(credit: Mike Mozart)

US transportation officials announced Wednesday that vaping on commercial flights is officially banned, just as is smoking the old-fashioned way.

The US Department of Transportation's decision to officially ban the use of electronic cigarettes on flights going to and from the United States ends any confusion as to whether vaping in the air is lawful.

"This final rule is important because it protects airline passengers from unwanted exposure to aerosol fumes that occur when electronic cigarettes are used onboard airplanes,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said. "The Department took a practical approach to eliminate any confusion between tobacco cigarettes and e-cigarettes by applying the same restrictions to both."

Zynga founder Mark Pincus has been booted out of the CEO job twice. (credit: Joi Ito)

It’s hard to overstate how much Zynga has collapsed in recent years, and it's struggling to regain its past glory. Since 2008, Zynga has lost nearly $1 billion and has only had one profitable year (2010).

Over the course of 2015, its quarterly average of daily average users (DAU) steadily declined from 25 million during the first quarter to 18 million in the fourth quarter. By comparison, Zynga DAU peaked at 72 million back in Q2 2012.

So what will the tenacious San Francisco startup do now? According to a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, founder Mark Pincus has been ousted again—he came back as CEO for the second time in April 2015. On March 7, the job will go to Frank Gibeau, a veteran of Electronic Arts—and he will be paid handsomely for it. Gibeau’s minimum salary will be $1 million and a “guaranteed minimum annual bonus equal to 100% of his annual base salary, pro-rated for the number of days he works for Zynga in 2016.”