Month: April 2017

(credit: Larry Rosenstein)

Apple went all-out in its patent assault on Samsung beginning in 2012, when Steve Jobs' promised "thermonuclear war" against Android became a reality. The patents used by the Cupertino device maker weren't just challenged in court, though. Various parties have challenged Apple's most important patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office, as well.

On Friday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an opinion (PDF) about an "ex parte reexam," filed against Apple's patent by an anonymous party. The reexam claimed that one of the patents upholding Apple's big win against Samsung, US Patent No. 7,844,915, never should have been issued at all. The '915 patent was described in a general way as the "pinch to zoom" patent, but its claims describe a way of distinguishing between one-touch and two-touch operations.

In 2013, the US Patent and Trademark Office's reexamination unit rejected all claims of Apple's '915 patent. A patent appeal board upheld the cancelation, leaving Apple to turn to the Federal Circuit, which has ultimate jurisdiction. On Friday, a panel of Federal Circuit judges sided with the patent office on some of the claims, but revived three others.

Enlarge (credit: Games Workshop)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our regular series on tabletop games! Check out a complete listing of all our board and card gaming coverage.

For gamers of a certain age, Blood Bowl has a special resonance. Pitched as “the game of fantasy football,” it’s gridiron for Tolkien fans, in which two teams taken from numerous fantasy races beat the ever-living crap out of one another while vaguely attempting to get a ball over a line. It is amazing.

This is the game's first boxed edition and its first new player models in something like 22 years—a criminal amount of time to wait for something so good. And while the components may be all-new and its models may benefit from two decades of improvements in plastics technology, the rules themselves are basically unchanged, and they're all the better for it.

Update noon EDT: The suspect shot and killed himself Tuesday after a police chase in Pennsylvania.

Original story:

(credit: Cleveland Police Department)

Authorities continued their search Monday for a Cleveland man accused of randomly shooting and killing an elderly man on Easter Sunday. Police said the suspect, 37-year-old Steve Stephens, uploaded the video he took of the heinous act to Facebook.

Enlarge / The iPad Air 2 (left) next to the iPad Air (right). (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you take your fourth-generation iPad into Apple for a repair, the company may replace your tablet with a newer iPad Air 2 instead. According to an internal memo published by MacRumors, Apple started doing this on March 30, right around when the $329 iPad became available for purchase:

Starting March 30, iPad 4th generation whole unit repairs may be substituted to iPad Air 2 models. Apple's repair and order management tool will indicate for each repair if a substitution will take place. Please note the substitute part’s color and capacity to ensure the customer understands what their replacement iPad whole unit will be.

While you may get a new color and capacity, we also assume that customers with Smart Covers or other accessories for their fourth-generation iPads will need to buy new accessories for the iPad Air 2; we've contacted Apple for clarification and will update if we get a response.

The iPad Air 2 is two years newer than an iPad 4—it's significantly thinner, lighter, and faster, and it support iOS features like multitasking than the iPad 4 isn't capable of. More importantly, it's certain to be supported by the next major version of iOS, while the iPad 4 is more than likely to be dropped from the support list. Apple is likely running out of parts and replacement tablets for the older iPad, while the only-recently-discontinued iPad Air 2 is still available in abundance in Apple's refurbished store.

Enlarge / The iPad Air 2 (left) next to the iPad Air (right). (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you take your fourth-generation iPad into Apple for a repair, the company may replace your tablet with a newer iPad Air 2 instead. According to an internal memo published by MacRumors, Apple started doing this on March 30, right around when the $329 iPad became available for purchase:

Starting March 30, iPad 4th generation whole unit repairs may be substituted to iPad Air 2 models. Apple's repair and order management tool will indicate for each repair if a substitution will take place. Please note the substitute part’s color and capacity to ensure the customer understands what their replacement iPad whole unit will be.

While you may get a new color and capacity, we also assume that customers with Smart Covers or other accessories for their fourth-generation iPads will need to buy new accessories for the iPad Air 2; we've contacted Apple for clarification and will update if we get a response.

The iPad Air 2 is two years newer than an iPad 4—it's significantly thinner, lighter, and faster, and it support iOS features like multitasking than the iPad 4 isn't capable of. More importantly, it's certain to be supported by the next major version of iOS, while the iPad 4 is more than likely to be dropped from the support list. Apple is likely running out of parts and replacement tablets for the older iPad, while the only-recently-discontinued iPad Air 2 is still available in abundance in Apple's refurbished store.

NASA

When the Internet came along in the 1990s, like a lot of government agencies, NASA kind of scratched its head and wondered what to make of all this freely shared information. But unlike a lot of other agencies, NASA had a trove of images, audio, and video the general public wanted to see. After all, this was the agency that had sent people to the Moon, taken photos of every planet in the Solar System, and launched the Hubble Space Telescope.

So each of the NASA field centers—there are 10 of them—began digitizing their photo archives and putting them online. Johnson Space Center in Houston, for example, had thousands of images of space shuttle astronauts training and flying in space. Kennedy Space Center had launch photos. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory had planets, rings, comets, and more. Unfortunately, these images were spread across dozens of NASA.gov sites, with no good way to search the different databases.