Month: April 2017

Enlarge (credit: USPTO)

This February, Garmin International got sued (PDF) by inventor Leigh Rothschild and his patent-holding company, Rothschild Connected Devices Innovations LLC (RCDI). RCDI had already sued 68 other companies. A few weeks later, Rothschild's lawyer got in touch. He wasn't interested in discussing the technology behind his client's two patents, which describe making customized mixed beverages. Instead, he asked Garmin to get on board with Rothschild's "early settlement program," for a fast payout of $75,000.

Garmin didn't pay up. Instead, the company's outside counsel Rachael Lamkin sent a letter to Rothschild's lawyer, explaining that his patents on a "system and method for creating a personalized consumer product" weren't valid, and ran afoul of Section 101 of the US Patent laws. That's the section that bars patents that are overly abstract, including "do it on a computer" type patents.

"Whether or not systems and methods for generating customized products are patent-eligible is a well-trodden question, repeatedly decided in the negative," Lamkin informed him, citing several earlier legal cases.

Enlarge (credit: Des Willie/BBC)

This is a post-UK broadcast review of Doctor Who: The Pilot. River Song always warned the Doctor against spoilers, so be sure to watch the episode first. Episodes of Doctor Who air on Saturdays at 7:20pm UK time on BBC One, and 9pm EDT on BBC America.

This is not a Dalek episode. It's a "bigger on the inside" episode. But it also adopts an obvious lesbian psycho trope—which is a pity: outgoing showrunner Steven Moffat makes the Doctor’s new companion gay and her first encounter with a monster happens to be an unhinged, shape shifting stalker who repeats everything Bill Potts says while dripping water onto the floor. Poor house guest, certainly. And probably not someone you would want to bring home to your family.

Enlarge / Abdullah Almashwali and his co-defendant used a self-serve kiosk like this one to mail illegal drugs. (credit: Aranami)

Just days before he was set to go to trial in Fresno, California, a Brooklyn man agreed to the government's assertion that he sold heroin and cocaine on AlphaBay. That site is one of the largest Dark Web marketplaces currently operating since Silk Road was seized and shut down in 2013.

On Friday morning, lawyers representing Abdullah Almashwali appeared before US District Judge Dale A. Drozd and filed a guilty plea to three counts of drug charges, likely in exchange for a lighter sentence. Almashwali was charged in August 2016 along with a co-conspirator, Chaudhry Ahmad Farooq. Farooq pled guilty in January 2017 and has yet to be sentenced.

According to an affidavit filed by a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the two men—selling under the names "DarkApollo" and "Area51"—made key mistakes online that ultimately betrayed them. Those monikers advertised that they were directly importing heroin from Afghanistan.

(credit: Steve Harwood)

Researchers from Colorado State University have been working with Google Street View to map pervasive natural-gas leaks. These leaks come from pipes that can be buried three-to-four feet below city streets. Many of the millions of miles of piping that deliver natural gas locally to urban and suburban homes are decades old—in some cases piping can be more than a century old. Older pipes can be made of cast-iron or bare steel, and they are often corroded or broken in places. But because they’re buried and because natural gas is invisible, it’s hard to tell when a pipe is leaking underneath a sidewalk. Sometimes, digging up and replacing a pipe isn’t worthwhile for the utility that owns it if the leaks isn’t an immediate risk to life and limb.

Besides the occasional explosion, there’s not much of a health risk associated with small natural-gas leaks. But natural gas is mostly comprised of methane (CH₄), a greenhouse gas. Although carbon dioxide sticks around in the atmosphere longer than methane does, it’s much more potent at warming the Earth in the short term than carbon dioxide.

That should make fixing the aging, leaking pipes under our cities a municipal priority. Although utilities will sometimes send employees out to neighborhoods to measure gas leaks from their pipes, they’re not always keen to share that data with citizens or even researchers. Even if utility workers are willing to share, making a complete census of all the leaks can be challenging.