Month: November 2016

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. (credit: FCC)

Tom Wheeler’s time as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is nearing an end now that Republican Donald Trump has won the presidency. You can expect Wheeler to step down from his chairmanship on or before January 20, when Trump is inaugurated.

It’s customary for the chair to step down when the White House shifts to the opposing party. All five FCC commissioners are appointed by the president and confirmed by the US Senate, with the president’s party having a one-vote majority. (The president usually appoints minority party commissioners based on recommendations made by minority party lawmakers.)

Trump can’t force Wheeler, a Democrat, to leave the commission entirely before his term expires, but the president can designate a new chairperson.

(credit: Pablo Ares Gastesi)

The Tennessee Supreme Court is vacating the child-porn production conviction of a Knoxville man, named Thomas Whited, who secretly filmed his 12-year-old daughter—and 14-year-old friend—showering, going to the bathroom, and undressing. Although the father recorded the bathroom for two months for sexual reasons, the high court vacated his 22-year sentence because what he filmed did not amount to pornography. The girls were not having sex, the high court reasoned (PDF) Monday, and instead the minors were videotaped in the bathroom performing "everyday activities."

Most states define child pornography to some extent on whether it is intended to sexually arouse the viewer, which was the case in the prosecution of Whited, a US Army National Guardsman. However, under Tennessee's child pornography laws, the intent of the viewer or producer of the recorded images doesn't matter. What does matter, however, is the story the images tell.

Tennessee defines child porn as depicting children having sex, simulated "sexual activity," and "lascivious exhibition" of children's private parts. There was no sexual or simulated sexual activity being filmed in the case of Whitfield, and the term "lascivious" is overbroad, the high court reasoned. Because of that vagueness in "lascivious," the court suggested that filming a baby's first bath could be considered child porn:

Enlarge / Intrauterine Devices. (credit: Getty | Media for Medical)

The day after Donald Trump’s stunning victory in the presidential election, a record number of Americans signed up for Obamacare health coverage, and women began scrambling for long-term contraception.

On Wednesday, more than 100,000 people selected plans through HealthCare.gov during this year’s signup period, which began November 1. “Best day yet this Open Enrollment,” said Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Mathews Burwell. In her tweet, she added the hashtag ‘GetCovered.’

Meanwhile, women’s health advocates are urging women to quickly get an intrauterine device, which can provide safe, highly reliable birth control for up to 10 years—well past a presidential term or two.

(credit: hehaden)

Those Brits, they just love their cute red squirrels. They think it’s a bloody shame that the more aggressive gray squirrels have pretty much taken over. The grays were brought to England from the US as playthings for 19^th century noblemen because they encapsulated the American pioneer spirit. But now it looks like these imports might have been an inadvertent act of disease prevention.

Red squirrels are now protected in the UK as the grays have completely infiltrated their habitat. But there's also a disease element to this struggle, a poignant rodent reversal of Europeans’ inadvertently killing off Native Americans with the smallpox they carried. Gray squirrels are immune to the squirrel pox virus that kills the native red squirrels, but they can still carry it.

Over the centuries, of course, England has faced more dire threats than invasive gray squirrels. One of these was leprosy. It had generally been thought that leprosy could be transmitted only between humans—that it had no other host to hide in. And it was also thought to be caused by only one infectious agent: Mycobacterium leprae.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

The proliferation of USB Type-C is making charging various devices easier than ever. Smartphones (other than the iPhone) and laptops are unifying under a single charging port, allowing any charger to plug into anything else. Today you can plug your Type-C phone into your Type-C laptop charger, and charging will happen. But because phones and laptops probably support different quick charging standards, the charging speed will be slower than it could be.

The two competing quick charging methods out there are the proprietary Qualcomm Quick Charge and the USB Power Delivery from the USB-IF standards body. Qualcomm has a near-monopoly in the high-end smartphone SoC market, so nearly every high-end device supports Qualcomm Quick Charge. Qualcomm SoCs don't really exist in the laptop market, so Type-C laptops from Apple, Google, and others use USB Power Delivery (USB-PD). Neither one is really better than the other, but the incompatibility means you're only getting basic charging speeds when you swap chargers.

To try aiming for quick charging unity, Google is telling Android OEMs to ditch Qualcomm's quick charge implementation and switch to USB-PD. Google seems really serious about this, as it has started to write quick charging language into the Android Compatibility Definition Document (CDD) that every OEM licensing Google's Android apps must follow. The new clause in the Android 7.0 CDD reads: