Month: August 2017

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A federal appeals court has upheld a decision mandating that Icon Health and Fitness pay $1.6 million in attorney's fees for filing an unwarranted patent lawsuit against a competitor.

Icon sued Octane Fitness in 2009, saying that Octane's high-end elliptical machines infringed US Patent No. 6,019,710, which describes an elliptical machine that allows for adjustments to accommodate individual strides. After two years of litigation, a district court judge found that Octane's machines didn't infringe. Octane asked for an award of legal fees, but later in 2011, a judge rejected the company's bid. That decision was upheld on appeal.

Octane didn't get its fee award, despite the fact that it had uncovered e-mails in discovery suggesting that Icon was simply using the lawsuit to hamper a smaller competitor. An Icon executive had described the '710 patent as an "old patent we had for a long time that was just sitting on the shelf."

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A California judge is dismissing a lawsuit brought by the family of a 20-year-old Minnesota college student who blames Apple for his 2013 death by an iPhone-wielding texting teen.

The dead boy's family claims that Apple had a legal duty to help prevent texting while driving and that it could have used patented technology it has developed to prohibit motorists from driving while distracted.

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Maureen Folan, however, took Apple's side. She agreeed with Cupertino's position that Apple didn't cause the crash that killed David Riggs while he was riding his scooter. What's more, the court agreed with Apple's contention that it does not have a legal obligation to help prevent distracted driving.

Enlarge / Entrepreneur Peter Thiel. (credit: Getty | Alex Wong )

Heavyweight tech investor and FDA-critic Peter Thiel is among conservative funders and American researchers backing an offshore herpes vaccine trial that blatantly flouts US safety regulations, according to a Monday report by Kaiser Health News.

The vaccine—a live but weakened herpes virus—was first tested in a 17-person trial on the Caribbean Island of St. Kitts without federal oversight or the standard human safety requirement of an institutional review board (IRB) approval. Biomedical researchers and experts have sharply rebuked the lack of safety oversight and slammed the poor quality of the data collected, which has been rejected from scientific publication. However, investors and those running the trial say it is a direct challenge to what they see as innovation-stifling regulations by the Food and Drug Administration.

“This is a test case,” Bartley Madden told KHN. Madden is another investor of the vaccine as well as a retired Credit Suisse banker and policy adviser to the conservative Heartland Institute. “The FDA is standing in the way, and Americans are going to hear about this and demand action.”

Enlarge / Flooding in Houston's theater district on Sunday, August 27, 2017 as the city battles with tropical storm Harvey and resulting floods. (credit: Getty Images | AFP | Thomas B. Shea)

Tropical Storm Harvey has disrupted at least 17 emergency call centers and 320 cellular sites, and it has caused outages for more than 148,000 Internet, TV, and phone customers.

The numbers come from the Federal Communications Commission, which activated its Disaster Information Reporting System to track Harvey's impact on communications services. Communications providers are being asked to submit outage information each morning, and the FCC is publishing a daily summary.

In 55 Texas and Louisiana counties that are part of the disaster area, 320 out of 7,804 cell sites were down as of yesterday at 11am EDT, according to the FCC's latest summary published yesterday. That's 4.1 percent across the area, but in a few Texas counties the cell blackouts affected more than 80 percent of cell sites.

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It's a bit odd that Mario's first completely fresh appearance on the Nintendo Switch isn't a traditional run-and-jump platform game but a novel foray into the tactical RPG genre. It's even odder that Mario has to share that debut with Ubisoft's incredibly annoying (yet ostensibly popular) Rabbids. Oddest of all, Nintendo's iconic mascot largely takes a back seat to those over-the-top, screaming humanoid rabbits in the game.

Sure, Mario might get top billing in Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. All told, though, it feels like Mario and crew were thrown into an existing Ubisoft game midway through the process. The game's plot, to the extent that it exists, uses a stolen "SupaMerge" device that literally fuses crazified Rabbids with well-known Mario antagonists like Donkey Kong and Piranha Plants, while merging "good" Rabbids with good guys like Mario, Luigi, and Peach to create completely new unholy abominations. There's also an intelligent Roomba named Beep-o that explains all this with a lot of wordy exposition that the other characters' wordless vamping for the camera can't really convey.

While Mario staples like coins and mushrooms make appearances, Ubisoft's characters and design aesthetic seem to win out most of the time. Heck, the Mario characters can't even jump without help from an ally, which is practically treasonous in a Mario game. This isn't really a knock against a title that maintains strong (if silly) visual and gameplay themes throughout. Just don't go in expecting a Mushroom Kingdom adventure in the vein of the Paper Mario or the Mario and Luigi games.

Take your positions

Anyone familiar with the positional battles in a game like XCOM, Fire Emblem, or Final Fantasy Tactics will recognize the same essential DNA in Kingdom Battle. While there are some perfunctory and simplistic coin-collecting and block-pushing puzzles forced in between the fights, the bulk of the game involves taking turns moving characters around a grid-based map so they're in place to attack the enemy while avoiding the incoming counter attacks.