Month: July 2016

(credit: DerekVelasquez)

Just weeks ago, Led Zeppelin defeated a Los Angeles federal copyright infringement lawsuit claiming the opening to the 1971 classic "Stairway to Heaven" was a rip-off of the 1968 instrumental song "Taurus." The suit was brought in 2014 by the estate of Randy Wolfe, who wrote the song for his band Spirit. Wolfe (aka Randy California) died in 1997.

Now nearly three weeks after the verdict, Zeppelin's lawyers are seeking almost $800,000 in costs and legal fees for their troubles. In American law, it's usually up to each side of a lawsuit to pay their own legal fees and court costs. But that's not always true when it comes to copyright law. And the Supreme Court on June 16 provided nuanced guidance to lower courts in determining whether the prevailing party in a copyright lawsuit should be awarded attorney fees. That ruling is likely to make it easier for winners in copyright cases to collect fees from the losing side.

In the "Stairway to Heaven" case, the lawyers said (PDF) in court documents that the suit should not have been brought in the first place. Zeppelin's lawyers claim the suit amounted to "nearly half-century-old claims that neither Randy Wolfe nor the owner of the allegedly-infringed copyright ever bothered to assert." Zep's attorney, Peter Anderson, added that the Wolfe trust "tried to tar 'Stairway to Heaven' and its authors, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant."

Comes with everything you see here. (credit: Adam Poots Games)

You'll never encounter a more brutal game than the pen-and-paper monstrosity that is Kingdom Death: Monster. Let's rattle off every one of its negatives:

Its print run is incredibly limited, meaning you can currently only buy the game from eBay resellers. Their insane price hikes make the game's retail ask of $400 seem quaint.

The box is crammed to the brim with enough content to terrify anybody. There's a 223-page book, a series of elaborate play boards, a gazillion minis, and hundreds of cards split into dozens of decks.

Summer sea ice and a large iceberg near Antarctica's Totten Glacier. (credit: Kelsey Winsor)

While sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk remarkably over the past few decades, sea ice around Antarctica has been dancing to the beat of a different drum. You might expect that as the world warms, sea ice would dwindle no matter which end of the planet it’s on, but the two regions are quite different.

While the North Pole sits in an ocean surrounded by land, the South Pole is in a continent surrounded by water. Antarctic sea ice grows outward from the coast, aided by the isolating winds that encircle the continent and carry frigid, inland air that pushes the ice around. So even as warmer water reaches under the floating ice shelves of Antarctica’s glaciers, persistently eating away at them, the growth of winter sea ice is more closely tied to wind patterns.

Climate models project a big decline in Arctic sea ice, with the end of summer becoming essentially sea-ice-free within a few decades at the current rate of warming. But in Antarctica, the models project smaller long-term declines.

Your aging plastic cartridges have never looked so good.

Back in 2014, we marveled at the announcement of the Analogue Nt, a heavily modified version of the original Nintendo Entertainment System with a solid aluminum case and an even more solid starting price: $500. We’ve been playing with our loaner unit for a few months now, and we’ve come away impressed with this sleek, modern love letter to classic gaming. While the price will put it beyond all but the most dedicated retro gaming hobbyists, we’re glad a product made with such obvious care and devotion exists for those who value authenticity and style above all else.

Before you go comparing apples to oranges, let’s be clear about what the Analogue Nt is not. It’s not one of those gray-market “Famiclone” systems that uses knock-off chips and provides “close enough” compatibility with most NES and Famicom cartridges (see our review of the Generation NEX for an example). It’s also not a system that uses an Android-based software emulator to run legitimate cartridges (like the Retron 5) or ROMs loaded onto an SD card. And it’s not one of those do-it-yourself kits that upgrades an existing NES with more modern features.

At its core, the Analogue Nt is actually a Famicom, the original Japanese version of the NES. Designer Christopher Taber tells Ars he sourced the system’s internals from “a large quantity of HVC-001 Famicom systems that were in cosmetically undesirable/unsellable condition.” That means the CPU and PPU that power the Analogue Nt were produced by Nintendo to run Famicom software about three decades ago. This means in turn that, unlike some other modern hardware that runs NES cartridges, the Analogue Nt should be compatible with any and all of the hundreds of NES/Famicom cartridges in existence with perfect accuracy (every game we’ve been able to test has run flawlessly). The Analogue’s authentic core also means it can take the Japan-only Famicom Disk System as an attachment. We haven’t tested that, but it’s an important feature for a certain subset of collectors.

This photo taken on June 27, 2016 shows the FAST at night. (credit: Xinhua photo/Liu Xu)

For half a century, the National Science Foundation's Arecibo telescope, sited in Puerto Rico, has been the world's largest radio observatory. It measures 305 meters across and among other major discoveries has confirmed the existence of neutron stars. The observatory also featured prominently in the movie Contact.

But now a Chinese observatory has superseded Arecibo. According to China's Xinhua news service, installation of the 500-meter FAST radio telescope is complete, with the last triangular reflector put into place. The observatory is expected to begin observing the heavens in September.

China has spent $180 million on the telescope since beginning construction in 2011 and will devote the next couple of years to testing and refining the massive instrument. After Chinese researchers receive the initial opportunities to use the telescope the government plans to open it to scientists worldwide, said Peng Bo, director of the NAO Radio Astronomy Technology Laboratory.