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Sprint has been filing patent lawsuits over VoIP for more than a decade now, and the company may have just scored its biggest payout yet. On Friday, a jury in Sprint's home district of Kansas City said that Time Warner Cable, now part of Charter Communications, must pay $139.8 million (Verdict Form) for infringing several patents related to VoIP technology. The jury found that TWC's infringement was willful, which means that the judge could increase the damage award up to three times its value.

“We are disappointed with the outcome and are considering our options,” a Charter spokesperson told Bloomberg News, which first reported the verdict. A Sprint spokesperson said the company was pleased with the verdict, which represented its "full damage demand."

The VoIP space has seen more than its share of patent lawsuits. Sprint pounded an $80 million patent settlement out of Vonage following a 2007 jury verdict. In 2008, Sprint sued several smaller VoIP providers, compelling companies like Big River Telephone Co., based in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to pay for a license to Sprint's patents.

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Rather than share the now-classified technological means that investigators used to locate a child porn suspect, federal prosecutors in Washington state have dropped all charges against a man accused of accessing Playpen, a notorious and now-shuttered website.

The case, United States v. Jay Michaud, is one of nearly 200 cases nationwide that have raised new questions about the appropriate limitations on the government’s ability to hack criminal suspects. Michaud marks just the second time that prosecutors have asked that case be dismissed.

"The government must now choose between disclosure of classified information and dismissal of its indictment," Annette Hayes, a federal prosecutor, wrote in a court filing on Friday. "Disclosure is not currently an option. Dismissal without prejudice leaves open the possibility that the government could bring new charges should there come a time within the statute of limitations when and the government be in a position to provide the requested discovery."

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The United States spends billions of dollars every year fighting wildfires. A recent paper published in PNAS finds that human-started conflagrations account for 84 percent of all wildfires in the US in recent years. These human-started wildfires have tripled the length of the annual fire season, and have dominated a geographic area that is seven times larger than the region affected by lightning-started fires. Overall, human-started fires were responsible for nearly half of all the land that was burned over the two-decade period of study.

The study analyzes wildfire data from 1992 to 2012, focusing only on wildfires that needed an agency response to manage or suppress, and were a threat to ecosystems or infrastructure. The fire data came from the publicly available US Forest Service Fire Program Database, which includes US federal, state, and local records for both public and private lands. Some fires are burns set intentionally for agricultural purposes, but the researchers excluded these. They also excluded fires with an unknown cause, and only concentrated on fires that were started either by humans or by lightning.

Despite these exclusions, there were still 1.5 million wildfires included in this analysis. Humans started 84 percent of them, primarily in the mountains of the western US. Meanwhile, 60 percent of the total land area of the continental US was affected by human-started wildfires, while only 8 percent of the land area was affected by lightning started fires.

They're not quite the Mars rover, but these Earth-based robots provide a service of a different sort: delivery. London-based Starship Technologies, already piloting robot delivery services in the District of Columbia and Redwood City, California, and elsewhere across the globe, has now won that right in Virginia. Come this summer, the Old Dominion state will be the nation's first to codify the rights of the so-called "electric personal delivery device." Idaho, Florida, and other states are also mulling legislation similar to the robot package Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliff just signed.

These wheeled robots—or call them land-based drones if you want—have a clear leg up on aerial-drone delivery services envisioned by Google, Amazon, and others. Air delivery brings with it a more scrutinized regulatory process and heightened safety standards. Research firm Gartner said in a report last month that drone delivery "will not be a major factor for several years."

But the sidewalk-based drone delivery market, however, appears to be shifting into gear, or at least into first gear. Take a look at Virginia's definitions and rules for personal delivery robots, which apply to all companies, not just Starship Technologies:

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

While a lot of fitness tracker companies struggle to make devices that combine the best of all worlds, others are sticking to what they know. Mio has been making heart rate monitors for years—most of its trackers are not the most comprehensive or the most stylish, but Mio knows heart rate, and it's sticking with that.

The new $130 Slice fitness tracker shifts slightly out of Mio's comfort zone while still mostly focusing on heart rate. It has a few extra features, including daily activity and sleep tracking, as well as smartphone alerts, but it uses Mio's optical heart rate monitoring technology and PAI point systems to assess your fitness level on a weekly basis. It's clear Mio sees the need to modernize its lineup with the Slice, but it also has to convince users that a one-trick pony can be just as good as a multipurpose device.