Month: October 2016

Rumors of a Surface-branded all-in-one computer continue to swirl around, and an October hardware event from Microsoft is still widely anticipated. Some new leaks have confirmed that new Surface hardware is almost surely on its way... but may not necessarily include a computer.

The Surface Keyboard in FCC filings.

Yesterday, Windows Central reported a new Surface-branded Bluetooth keyboard. The keyboard looks like an updated, redesigned version of the keyboard in the Designer Bluetooth Desktop package: low profile, straight (non-ergonomic) design, with chiclet style keys. Windows Central also claims that a second ergonomic design is in the pipeline.

Today, thanks to the FCC, we have evidence of a new Surface-branded mouse, too. While the keyboard looks like an updated design, the mouse looks identical, save for its color, to the existing Designer Mouse. Both keyboard and mouse are in the same gray as the magnesium alloy of the Surface Book, and both are Bluetooth 4 Low Energy devices. The mouse should last an impressive 12 months on its two AAA batteries.

Enlarge / Growing food and creating a livable environment are two engineering challenges on Mars that are just as important as making fuel. (credit: The Martian)

While Elon Musk's recent speech about the glories of Martian colonies is still echoing in our ears, we should take a moment to consider what it means to colonize a planet. It's not just about setting up some habitat pods and sucking water out of the regolith. Acquiring food and a livable environment are just as important as manufacturing rocket fuel, which is why it made sense to make a botanist the brave hero of recent colonization epic The Martian. You might say that growing space potatoes is key to the interplanetary survival of our species.

Put another way: we need awesome rockets to get to Mars, but we need environmental science if we're going to stay there. Colonization requires us to settle—actually settle, like my ancestors did in the 19th century wilds of Texas—in an alien ecosystem. For all we know, that ecosystem might be teeming with life. Unfortunately, colonization also requires us to destroy that alien ecosystem and replace it with one we prefer.

This is where we run headlong into the moral quandaries of our future space adventures. We can use existing environmental science to understand the nature of these quandaries. But to prepare for the ethical issues involved, it helps to have some science fiction.

Enlarge / This Galaxy Note 7 caused an evacuation of a Southwest flight this morning. (credit: Brian Green)

It looks like Samsung's exploding battery woes may not be behind it just yet. According to a report from The Verge, a Southwest Airlines flight was evacuated this morning when a Galaxy Note 7 began smoking in a passenger's pocket. Worryingly, the phone wasn't actually one of the recalled defective units—it was a new model that had already been replaced by AT&T just a couple of weeks before.

The plane was still at the gate when the Note 7 caught fire, and all passengers were successfully evacuated with no reported injuries.

Phone and laptop battery explosions do crop up in the news from time to time, but they rarely result in recalls on the scale of Samsung's. More frequently, they're the result of physical damage, which appears to be the case for both an iPhone 7 and an iPhone 6 Plus that have made the news for exploding this week.

The machines we're familiar with operate on some pretty obvious principles. It's easy to supply them with energy, whether it's chemical or mechanical. Given parts we've carefully arranged, that energy gets converted into some form of useful work, like pumping water or moving a car. While the environment can have an effect on the machine's performance, the machine can usually operate over a wide range of conditions.

Absolutely none of this is true at the level of individual molecules, yet people have figured out how to make machines out of little more than a few dozen atoms. This year's chemistry Nobel honors three pioneers in this field.

Nearly everything about building a molecule-sized machine is hard. You can't put the parts in their proper places by hand or even with a small machine; they have to be built by chemical synthesis. The environment dominates at the molecular level, with Brownian motion tending to force molecules to move about at random rather than in the directed manner needed to perform work. And providing energy to a molecule is much more challenging than giving an internal combustion engine something to burn—the energy for a molecular machine needs to be precisely tailored to act at specific chemical bonds.

Enlarge / Bardstown Road in Louisville, Kentucky. (credit: Scott Smithson)

Charter Communications has sued the local government in Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky in order to stop a new ordinance that gives Google Fiber easier access to utility poles.

Charter’s complaint in US District Court in Louisville on Friday (full text) is similar to one filed earlier by AT&T. Like AT&T before it, Charter wants to stop Louisville Metro’s One Touch Make Ready ordinance that lets new entrants like Google Fiber make all of the necessary wire adjustments on utility poles instead of having to wait for incumbent providers to send work crews to move their own wires. Charter alleges that the ordinance violates its Fifth Amendment property rights and could cause service outages for its customers if Google Fiber’s installers make mistakes.

Charter, the second biggest cable company in the US, is also mad that both AT&T and Google Fiber face less onerous restrictions in their TV franchise agreements than Charter does. Charter claims the differential treatment violates its First Amendment right to “speak” as a cable TV provider but did not point to any specific “speech” that has been suppressed.

The National Security Agency in Ft. Meade, Maryland. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

A government contractor with top-secret clearance was arrested in late August and criminally charged with “unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials by a government employee or contractor,” according to the Department of Justice.

The New York Times reported that the worker was a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor working on behalf of the National Security Agency.

"I can’t think of any prosecutions that have had at least the speculation of the large scale insider threat that The New York Times appears to be saying," Susan Hennessey, the managing editor of Lawfare and a former attorney at the Office of General Counsel at the NSA, told Ars.