Month: August 2018

Enlarge / Volkswagen AG Turbocharged Direct Injection (TDI) vehicles sit parked in a storage lot at San Bernardino International Airport (SBD) at dusk in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday, April 5, 2017. Volkswagen agreed last year to buy back about 500,000 diesels that it rigged to pass US emissions tests if it can't figure out a way to fix them. In the meantime, the company is hauling them to storage lots, such as ones at an abandoned NFL stadium outside Detroit, the Port of Baltimore and a decommissioned Air Force base in California. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Getty Images)

If you own a diesel Volkswagen or Audi that was affected by the company's 2015 diesel scandal, and if you haven't submitted the proper paperwork to receive compensation, you only have one month left to do so.

Two years ago, Volkswagen proposed a settlement with a consumer's class-action group: the automaker would put up more than $10 billion to fix or buy back roughly 475,000 diesel Volkswagens and Audis outfitted with illegal software. The software allowed the cars to pass emissions tests under pre-arranged testing conditions, but the cars suppressed the emissions control system while they were being driven on the road in the real world.

After news of the cheating was made public, the value of the affected vehicles dropped dramatically. Vehicle owners filed a class-action suit in district court, and VW Group proposed its settlement nearly a year later. Customers would have two years to file a claim for restitution. They also had a choice: allow VW Group to buy back their car at the value of the vehicle before the news of the cheating was made public, or allow VW Group to fix the vehicle to bring it into compliance with federal emissions rules. All owners and lessees would receive an additional cash payout as well.

Enlarge / Robin Sloan likes to play with robots in fiction and real life. He also makes his own olive oil.

Robin Sloan writes about machine learning, but he's writing with it, too. His 2017 novel Sourdough has been hailed as one of the best and most accurate novels about machine learning ever published. In the wake of that book, Robin also built a little bot that will help you write science fiction by autocompleting your sentences with phrases taken from a massive corpus of sci-fi stories.

At Ars Technica Live this Wednesday, Aug. 8, we'll be talking to Robin about the reality and fantasy of machine learning, as well as what it means to write in the age of bots. Join Ars Technica's editor-at-large Annalee Newitz and senior editor Cyrus Farivar in conversation with Robin on August 8 at Eli's Mile High Club in Oakland. There will be plenty of time for audience questions, too. Doors open at 7pm, and the event starts at 7:30. Tickets are free.

Robin is the author of the novels Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, a New York Times bestseller published in 2012, and Sourdough. He has been doing experiments that use machine learning to auto-generate sentences for sci-fi stories, and he's pretty sure that the audiobook for his second novel is the world's first to include sound generated by a neural network. Previously he worked at the Poynter Institute, Current TV, and Twitter, where he worked on projects about the future of media.

Enlarge / One of many pieces of art commissioned for the cards in Artifact, coming to Steam in November of this year. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Valve Software's first brand-new video game since 2013, the digital card-dueling game Artifact, finally has a release date: November 28.

This is the first Valve game since Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to launch with a fixed release price as opposed to the free-to-play model enjoyed by Valve games like Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2. Anyone who wants to play Artifact will need to buy the game's base model at $19.99, which will be available on all Steam platforms—meaning Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

What exactly does $19.99 get you? The game maker didn't answer this in its press release, so we reached out to Valve's Doug Lombardi, who broke down the exact package included in that cost: two pre-made "base" decks of 54 cards each ("5 heroes, 9 items, and 40 other cards") and 10 sealed packs of cards, which each include 12 random cards, one of which is guaranteed to be "rare." Additional 12-card packs will be sold directly by Valve at $2 a pop at launch.

Enlarge / An Atlas V rocket lifts off in 2016, powered by a single RD-180 engine and solid rocket boosters. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

According to Russian publications, the Russia-based rocket propulsion company Energomash has signed a deal to sell six more RD-180 rocket engines to United Launch Alliance in 2020. These six engines will allow for six additional flights of the Atlas V rocket, which flies national security payloads and science missions for the US government. Soon, the rocket will also fly Boeing's crewed Starliner spacecraft into orbit.

NASA has understandably made a big deal out of its commercial crew program through which it is paying Boeing and SpaceX to develop spacecraft that will allow astronauts to launch to the International Space Station from Florida. Since the 2011 retirement of the space shuttle, NASA has gotten its people into space aboard Russian rockets launching from Kazakhstan.

Seizing upon this announcement, the Russian embassy in Washington, DC, evidently felt the need to troll United Launch Alliance, the US military, and NASA on Twitter, saying, "Russian rocket engines to continue launching America into space."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images )

Charter CEO Tom Rutledge yesterday vowed to fight the New York state government's decision to kick Charter out of the state.

The State Public Service Commission (PSC) voted Friday to revoke its approval of Charter's 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable (TWC), and ordered Charter to sell the former TWC system. No one expected Charter to leave New York without a fight, and Rutledge confirmed the company's plans yesterday in an earnings call with investors. "We're hopeful that we can work all this out, but if necessary, we'll litigate and we believe we're in the right," Rutledge said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.

The dispute is over Charter's alleged noncompliance with broadband construction requirements. New York's 2016 merger approval required Charter to extend its network to 145,000 unserved and underserved residential housing units and businesses within four years, and to meet several interim deadlines along the way.

Enlarge (credit: NOAA)

Society has an insatiable desire for data. In fact, it is rather astonishing to think that average Internet traffic is several hundred terabits per second and consumes about eight percent of our electricity production. All of that for instant cat videos—and our desire for new cat videos is apparently insatiable, driving the need for more capacity and even more energy.

It would, however, be nice to scale capacity without energy requirements continuing to grow at the same rate. In a step toward achieving this goal, researchers have managed to encode an insane amount of information into the light of a single laser.

The problem with scaling bandwidth and power comes down to lasers and their inefficiency. A good laser is about 30-percent efficient. A typical telecommunications laser might emit 20mW, so that's at least 70mW for each laser (the amplifiers consume even more energy). To pack more data into a single optical fiber, the data is divided across different colors of light, called wavelength division multiplexing. Unfortunately, each color requires its own laser, meaning the energy cost increases with bandwidth. 

Back in January, Valve's Steam platform hit an all-time peak, averaging more than 16.8 million daily users for the month. In July, that daily usage average dipped to just under 14.9 million, a nearly 12-percent drop that reflects an uncharacteristic yearlong trend in reduced usage for the service.

The 2018 Steam usage decline is mirrored in reported data on "in-game" Steam users, who actually open up a Steam game rather than just having the Steam launcher running that day. After peaking at an average of 6.16 million in January, Steam averaged just 4.53 million in-game users in July, a nearly 26-percent drop.

Enlarge / Crop marks trace the circular boundaries of a prehistoric settlement, with the faint outlines of a Roman villa inside. (credit: Crown Copyright: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales)

In southern Wales’ Vale of Glamorgan, archaeologists flying over a prehistoric settlement they had previously studied got a surprise: the ghostly outline of a Roman villa on the ground inside the older settlement’s boundaries. “We know of Roman villas built within prehistoric settlements elsewhere,” the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales wrote in a published statement, “but this is a new example.”

Other new discoveries have been popping up across the British Isles over the last few weeks. An atmospheric high pressure system parked over Scandinavia has made the weather hotter and drier than usual across much of northern Europe. The resultant drought creates the perfect conditions for what archaeologists call “crop marks.”

Stone walls or foundations buried beneath a modern landscape tend to absorb more heat than the soil around them. The heat that those buried stones radiate can bake the soil above to a lighter color, so the outlines of ancient buildings and fences show up on the parched surface of modern lawns and fields. The shapes of centuries-old garden beds and paths have emerged from the lawns of several old estates in the UK. At Gawthorpe Hall in Lancashire, the shapes included some details no one had seen before that may be the ruins of even older gardens, dating back to the reign of Elizabeth I.