Month: July 2017

ThinkGeek

Nintendo may have discontinued the NES Classic Edition back in April, but there is one retailer selling new, boxed units today. Thinkgeek tells us it will be putting up an order page (currently broken) for what it say are "thousands" of NES Classic units as part of bundles that range in price from $140 to $220. The order page was supposed to go up at 3 p.m. Eastern today, according to a ThinkGeek spokesperson, but there seems to have been some delay on the site's end. We'll update when the link is live.

"The GameStop buying ninjas got a hold of these, and we’re selling them," a spokesperson for the Gamestop-owned ThinkGeek told Ars of the unexpected stock. "Sometimes it's good to have Corporate Overlords."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images/Ulrich Baumgartgen)

Google is taking legal action in the US to stop Canada's Supreme Court from controlling its search results worldwide.

Last month, the Supreme Court of Canada ordered Google to remove links to webpages owned by a company called Datalink Technologies on all of its search websites, worldwide. Canadian courts had previously found that Datalink was illegally re-labeling products and infringing the intellectual property of a Vancouver tech firm called Equustek.

Yesterday, Google filed a lawsuit (PDF) in California, asking a judge to rule that the Canadian order is unenforceable in the US. Google lawyers argue that the order violates both the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which prevents online platforms from being held responsible for most user behavior.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we're back with a big new list of deals to share. Of note is a the Lenovo Y700 gaming notebook, complete with a Core i5 processor, a 14-inch 1080p display, 4GB AMD R9 M375 GPU, 128GB SSD, and 1TB HDD, for just $569 (over $200 off its original price). Apple's AirPods are also back in stock, so now's your chance to get your hands on the popular wireless earbuds before the sell out again.

Check out the full list of deals below.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Enlarge / A power cable sits in the charge point of a Toyota Motor Corp. FT- EV III concept electric vehicle on display during the China (Guangzhou) International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China, on Saturday, November 21, 2015. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images)

According to reports in The Wall Street Journal and Japan’s Chunichi Shimbun, Toyota is in the “production engineering” stage of building an electric vehicle (EV) battery with a solid electrolyte. Reports suggest the new battery will debut in Japan in a model 2022 car with an all-new platform.

So-called “solid state” batteries have both solid electrodes and solid electrolytes. Solid-state batteries can be made smaller and lighter than the lithium-ion batteries that currently power electric vehicles, but engineering such a battery at an attractive price point for mass production has been a challenge. The Chunichi Shimbun reported that Toyota’s battery will be able to charge in a few minutes and have a long range, but the article did not list specifics.

A solid-state battery would also reduce the fire risk that comes with lithium-ion batteries that use a liquid electrolyte. And, because the electrolyte wouldn’t be in danger of freezing, it could withstand a wider range of temperatures.

Enlarge / Nitin Jairam Gadkari, minister of Road Transport, Highways and Shipping of India at the India Economic Summit 2016 in New Delhi, India. Copyright by World Economic Forum / Benedikt von Loebell (credit: World Economic Forum)

Companies in the United States, Germany, Japan, and other countries are racing to develop self-driving cars. But India's top transportation regulator says that those cars won't be welcome on Indian streets any time soon.

"We won’t allow driverless cars in India," said Nitin Gadkari, India's minister for Road Transport, Highways, and Shipping, according to the Hindustan Times. "I am very clear on this. We won’t allow any technology that takes away jobs."

In recent years, new technology has mostly created jobs for drivers. In India, the leading ride-sharing services, Ola and Uber, completed 500 million rides in 2016, creating work for Indian drivers. But Uber's ultimate goal is to introduce fully self-driving cars that will make these driving jobs obsolete.

Enlarge (credit: Gramercy Pictures)

The advent of DNA testing has made it uncomfortably clear that our criminal justice system often gets things wrong. Things go wrong for a variety of reasons, but many of them touch on science, or rather the lack of a scientific foundation for a number of forensic techniques. But in 70 percent of the cases where DNA has overturned a conviction, it also contradicted the testimony of one or more eyewitnesses to the events at issue.

According to a new perspective published in PNAS, that shouldn't surprise us. The paper's author, Salk neuroscientist Thomas Albright, argues that we've learned a lot about how humans perceive the world, process information, and hold on to memories. And a lot of it indicates that we shouldn't value eyewitness testimony as much as we do. Still, Albright offers some suggestions about how we can tailor the investigative process to compensate a bit for human limitations.

Persistence of memory

Albright has some history in this area, as he co-chaired a study group at the National Academies of Science on the topic. His new perspective is largely a summary of the report that resulted from the group, and it's an important reminder that we have sound, evidence-based recommendations for improving the criminal justice system. Failure to implement them several years after the report is problematic.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich / Thinkstock)

Back in 2012, Adobe recognized that Flash's end was near, with a five- to 10-year timeframe for its eventual phasing out. Today, the company got specific: Flash will be supported through to the end of 2020, after which the Flash player will cease to be developed and distributed.

In the early days of the Web, Flash served an essential role, offering graphical and interactive capabilities that simply had no equivalent in plain HTML and JavaScript. Since then, a raft of technologies—canvas for 2D graphics, WebGL for 3D graphics, HTML5's video and audio tags, JavaScript interfaces for microphones and webcams, among others—have piece by piece eliminated the need for Flash. With, most recently, support for DRM-protected video being incorporated into HTML5, the need for Flash is largely eliminated.

As such, Adobe, together with Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, has planned to end-of-life the browser plugin. The plugin will be fully supported and maintained until the end of 2020, with browsers such as Chrome and Edge continuing to embed and patch the plugin. Adobe also says that in "certain [unspecified] geographies" it will move to end the support and use of the plugin more aggressively, due to widespread use of outdated versions of the software.