Month: November 2017

If two-month-early ticket sales causing delays at sites like Fandango weren't indication enough, there's plenty of audience appetite for Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi this fall. Disney evidently knows this, too, and according to The Wall Street Journal, the company is happily using its leverage in unprecedented distribution deals with theaters over the next Star Wars installment.

WSJ reports Disney has crafted agreements through which it will receive roughly 65 percent of ticket sales, "a new benchmark for a Hollywood studio" according to the report. (Average splits range from 40 percent abroad to 55 percent on average in the US to 60 percent for only the largest hits, WSJ writes.) And anonymous theater owners told the paper that Disney's list of requirements for carrying The Last Jedi are the "most onerous they’ve ever seen."

Among the asks theaters had to oblige, Disney insisted The Last Jedi must be shown on a participating theater's largest auditorium for at least four weeks, theaters must sign individually watermarked contracts so official language doesn't leak, and any marketing must be held until Disney gives theaters the go-ahead.

Sony

Weird Sony is back, and it recently announced a new version of the Sony Aibo, everyone's favorite robotic toy dog! Sony has been out of the plastic pooch business for about 11 years, and the 2017 version is well-equipped for the smartphone era with LTE and an app. Sadly, like seemingly every Aibo ever, the pup is only for sale in Sony's hometown of Japan, but we can still love it from afar.

The Aibo tries to replicate a real dog and doesn't do much else. The new version has 22 axes of motion. The legs let it walk, shake hands, sit, play with a ball, scratch a digital itch, and do "hundreds" of other dog things. The tail wags, the ears move, the mouth opens, and the head turns and tilts, making it seem rather expressive in the videos.

Enlarge / Mihai Moldovanu tinkers with his beloved Cobra. (credit: Adi Dabu)

BUCHAREST, Romania—Mihai Moldovanu grabs the cardboard box with the enthusiasm of a man from the future who’s opening a time capsule.

“Maybe it could still work,” he tells me.

He dusts it off with his hands. Inside the box rests the computer he built for himself in high school. He hasn’t switched it on in 10, maybe 20 years. This summer, when moving from one apartment to another, he stumbled upon the box. “I need to find a charger and an old TV set. It’s going to be tricky to revive it.”

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto/Getty Images)

This summer, DefCon's "Voting Machine Hacking Village" turned up a host of US election vulnerabilities (PDF). Now, imagine a more mainstream national hacking event backed by the Department of Homeland Security that has the same goal: to discover weaknesses in voting machines used by the states for local and national elections.

That might just become a reality if federal legislation (PDF) unveiled Tuesday becomes law. The proposal comes with a safe harbor provision to exempt participants from federal hacking laws. Several federal exemptions for ethical hacking that paved the way for the DefCon hacking village expire next year.

The bipartisan "Securing America's Voting Equipment Act" also would provide election funding to the states and would designate voting systems as critical infrastructure—a designation that would open up communication channels between the federal government and the states to share classified threat information.

Enlarge (credit: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick)

What does it take to build a gas giant? Building models of planet formation and studying exosolar systems have both provided us with some hints. But there's a small but growing list of cases where the two of these approaches disagree about what's possible. A new paper adds to that list by describing a gas giant planet that orbits a dwarf star, creating a situation where the planet is 25 percent the size of its host—the smallest difference between planet and star yet observed.

Gas giants, as their name implies, are mostly hydrogen and helium. But models of planet formation have suggested that they can only form in systems with a lot of heavier elements around. The idea is that a large core of rocky material has to form quickly, before the star fully ignites and drives off any nearby gas. If the rocky body gets big enough early enough, it can grab enough gas to start a runaway atmospheric accumulation, turning itself into a gas giant.

Studying exosolar systems provides some support for this idea. We can get a sense of how many heavier elements—generically termed metals—were around during planet formation by looking at their presence in the host star. If the star has a high metal content, then the planets probably had access to lots of heavier elements, too. For small, rocky planets, it doesn't seem to matter how many heavier elements were around, as they're found at stars with various degrees of metal content. The same is true for super-Earths and Neptune-sized planets.

HoloLens Development Edition. (credit: Microsoft)

Much of the interest around augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) has focused on consumers and, in particular, gaming, but if those technologies are to become a significant and sustained part of the computing landscape, they probably need to find markets beyond entertainment. Microsoft has been pushing its HoloLens AR headset as an enterprise product, and today the company greatly expanded its availability.

Previously available in ten countries, Microsoft has added a further 29 European markets, bringing HoloLens to 39 countries in total.

While the headset remains priced far out of reach of consumers, Redmond is championing it as a device with a wide range of industrial applications. Ford, for example, is using HoloLens headsets to improve its design process, allowing modifications of both its clay models and real cars to be viewed and modified on the fly, without having to re-sculpt or rebuild anything. ThyssenKrupp has trialled equipping the technicians that service the elevators that the company builds with HoloLens headsets. They can use the headsets to show engineers the faults they're trying to diagnose, and likewise those engineers can annotate the physical infrastructure in front of them to highlight problem areas and guide maintenance and repairs—and all while leaving the technician's hands free.