Month: January 2020

Enlarge / Crews carrying out a prescribed burn in California's San Bernardino National Forest. (credit: San Bernardino National Forest)

Whenever wildfires rip through an area, splashing nightmarish scenes across the evening news, people who live elsewhere seem to have a lot of suggestions. Why don’t they log the forest so there’s less to burn? Why don’t they get millions of goats to graze the brush? Why live in such a dangerous spot? But as with most things, there are usually complications when you look closer.

A new study led by Stanford’s Rebecca Miller analyzes one option for limiting fires in California: prescribed burns. The researchers interviewed experts in state government, federal agencies, non profits, and academia to find out what barriers are preventing greater use of prescribed burns.

Burning to avoid burns

Prescribed burns utilize low-intensity fires during favorable weather to safely remove some of the fuel that has accumulated on the ground—fuel present partly as a result of our past practice of putting out wildfires as aggressively as possible. It’s often combined with mechanical thinning of brush and trees that serve as “ladders” for fires to climb into treetops, with the resulting brush piles burned later. The researchers say that about 20 percent of the state—20 million acres—could benefit from prescribed burns to reduce the wildfire hazard. But California is not currently on pace to complete that monumental task any time soon.

Enlarge / The iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max running iOS 13. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Two years ago, Apple dropped a plan that would have made it impossible for the company to decrypt iPhone and iPad backups for law enforcement, according to a Reuters report today. Reuters wrote that "six sources familiar with the matter" confirmed that Apple dropped the end-to-end encryption plan for iCloud Backup "after the FBI complained that the move would harm investigations."

Apple had "told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud" more than two years ago, Reuters wrote.

"Under that plan, primarily designed to thwart hackers, Apple would no longer have a key to unlock the encrypted data, meaning it would not be able to turn material over to authorities in a readable form even under court order," the report continued.

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  It exists, and Lego has already built it: the International Space Station kit arrives February 1. [credit: @LEGO on Instagram ]

Perhaps reinforcing the idea that waiting until the last minute can be good for gift-seekers, Lego today announced it has produced an International Space Station-inspired set that will be available on February 1 for $69.99. (Outside of an Ars subscription, this is the perfect Valentine's Day gift for any Arsian in your life.)

Like prior Lego space releases such as the Saturn V, this ISS model looks robust. The set contains 850-plus pieces and when built stands over 7-inches (20cm) high, 12-inches (31cm) long, and 19-inches (49cm) wide. According to the official company press release, loving details include a posable Canadarm2 and two rotating joints that coincide with eight adjustable solar panels. The set also comes with some delightful extras, such as a pair of astronaut minifigs, a brick-built mini space shuttle, and a 148-page booklet stuffed with info on the real ISS.

Besides being a drool-worthy addition to any brickhead's collection, the Lego ISS doubles as a celebration of the Lego Ideas initiative, which turns 10 this year. Ideas is a platform where users can submit proposals for future sets, and those submissions that garner enough support through votes can ultimately end up in production. (See that awesome Women of NASA set from 2017 as just one example.) Lego fan Christoph Ruge submitted his ISS proposal more than three years ago, but it resurfaced thanks to Lego revisiting popular ideas that hadn't been produced as a way of celebrating Ideas turning 10. Ruge's Ideas page is a nice collection of other space proposals, by the way: can we get a Baikonur or Hubble set sometime, too?

Enlarge / Turns out Nintendo wasn't infringing on a 1999 patent when it made this controller. (credit: Marlith)

Remember the Nintendo Wii? Years ago, a few companies tried to claim they had patented the system's innovative motion-sensing controller technology before Nintendo did and thus deserved a cut of the massive profits Nintendo derived from the platform. One of those companies, iLife, even managed to secure a $10.1 million judgement against Nintendo in 2017 after a jury found that the Wii (and Wii U) infringed on the Dallas-based company's 1999 patent for a body-mounted fall-detection system.

Now, over two years after that judgment, a Dallas federal court has overturned that monetary award and invalidated iLife's patent altogether.

iLife's original patent describes a system that determines whether someone is falling by "process[ing] said sensed dynamic and static accelerative phenomena as a function of at least one accelerative event characteristic to thereby determine whether said evaluated body movement is within environmental tolerance." On the surface, that's somewhat similar to the accelerometer-based movement detection on the Wii Remote, even if the use case is entirely different (and even if there's no evidence iLife actually sold any device that implemented the patented idea).