Month: February 2020

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

Music-industry lawyers plan to ask potential jurors in a piracy case whether they read Ars Technica.

"Have you ever read or visited Ars Technica or TorrentFreak?" is one of 40 voir dire questions that plaintiffs propose to ask prospective jurors in their case against Grande Communications, an Internet service provider accused of aiding its customers' piracy, according to a court filing on Friday. TorrentFreak pointed out the juror question in an article yesterday.

Grande was sued in April 2017 by the three major labels, namely Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Bros. Records. The case is in US District Court for the Western District of Texas.

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  The BlackBerry KeyOne from TCL. It seems fine from a distance, but TCL was charging way too much for it. [credit: TCL ]

BlackBerry is quitting the phone business—again. You might recall BlackBerry quit manufacturing smartphones back in 2016, but it licensed its brand name to the Chinese smartphone corporation TCL. TCL started pumping out BlackBerry-branded devices—some of which were QWERTY equipped and some of which were shameless rebadgings of existing TCL phones. TCL's Zombie BlackBerry plan apparently wasn't working too well, though, since now that's dead, too.

Today, BlackBerry Mobile posted what amounts to an amicable breakup note on Twitter, saying that TCL's license to the BlackBerry brand would expire August 31, 2020, at which point the two companies would go their separate ways. Once the agreement expires, TCL will have "no further rights to design, manufacture, or sell any new BlackBerry mobile devices," though the company would still be on the hook for supporting existing devices until August 31, 2022. With no other manufacturers lined up, it sounds like BlackBerry-branded phones will be dead for good.

We've seen many smartphone brands slowly die out over the years, but the expiration of a license sounds like it's going to lead to the unique situation of a clean, decisive execution. What happens if there are leftover TCL BlackBerry phones? Do they get buried in the desert?

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  Eleanor (Kristen Bell) takes charge of a new experiment. [credit: NBC/Universal ]

We have bid a tearful farewell to The Good Place, NBC's hilariously inventive, yet thoughtful, take on the afterlife. The show delivered rich characters and plenty of laughs, but it also challenged us to ponder deeper questions of what it really means to be a good person. Consistently intelligent and insightful, particularly about human foibles, each season held enough surprising turns and unexpected twists to keep a typical sitcom running for twice as many seasons. But The Good Place was never a typical sitcom. I'm pleased to report that in the series finale, the writers didn't blink while grappling with (among other things) the troubling implications of an infinite afterlife for finite humans.

(Spoilers for first three and a half seasons below. Major spoilers from the last half of S4 are below the second gallery. We'll give you a heads up when we get there.)

In the pilot episode, Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) woke up in a generically pleasant waiting room and discovered she was dead and in "the Good Place." Neighborhood architect Michael (Ted Danson) explained the afterlife point system and introduced her to Janet (D'Arcy Carden), an AI guide who serves as the Good Place's main source of information and can pretty much give residents anything they desire (however ludicrous). Eleanor also met her "soulmate": a moral philosophy professor named Chidi (William Jackson Harper). Once they were alone, Eleanor confessed to Chidi that she'd been admitted to paradise by mistake and asked him to help her become a better person—no small feat, since by her own admission, Eleanor was a "trash bag" of a human being back on Earth.

Enlarge / It turns out the robot uprising will be equipped with (checks notes) sharp chert flakes.

A team of archaeologists recently applied high-tech engineering tests to stone tools, and the results suggest that even very early members of our genus, like Homo habilis, knew how to select rocks with the right combination of sharpness and durability for the work at hand.

Species on the hominin family tree have made and used stone tools for about 2.6 million years that we know of; you could call it a family tradition. At Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania, sediment layers dating back to about 1.8 million years ago contain simple stone tools—the handiwork of a small hominin called Homo habilis. That species was an early member of our genus who walked upright and had a mixture of human and ape-like features. Starting around 1.2 million years ago, a later hominin species called Homo erectus made more complex stone tools, like hand-axes.

Think about a stone flake from the oldest layers at Olduvai. That simple tool exists because 1.8 million years ago, a Homo habilis picked out a rock, worked the stone into the right shape, and then used it to do something. Archaeologists can learn a lot about what ancient hominins knew and how they lived by studying the wear and knapping marks on such tools. But the rock itself has a story to tell. Why did a hominin 1.5 million years ago pick this kind of rock, and why this particular chunk of it?

Enlarge / Bernard Ebbers after his conviction in 2005. (credit: Adam Rountree/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Bernard Ebbers, the man who built Worldcom into a telecom giant before it collapsed into bankruptcy, has died at the age of 78. Ebbers was released from prison in December after serving 13 years for fraud and conspiracy charges related to the Worldcom scandal.

Ebbers was born in Canada and operated a hotel chain in Mississippi before getting involved in the burgeoning long-distance phone business in the early 1980s. He became an investor in, and then the CEO of, a small long-distance provider called LDDS.

Through a series of acquisitions, Ebbers grew LDDS into one of the nation's largest telecommunications companies. He re-branded the company Worldcom in 1995.