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Florida's state government cannot force schools to reopen this month, a judge ruled yesterday. The state's order to reopen K-12 schools disregarded safety risks posed by COVID-19 and gave schools no meaningful alternative, according to the ruling issued by Judge Charles Dodson of the Second Judicial Circuit in Leon County.

On July 6, Florida Department of Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran issued an emergency order stating, "Upon reopening in August, all school boards and charter school governing boards must open brick and mortar schools at least five days per week for all students." Schools that don't meet this requirement could lose state funding. Corcoran, Governor Ron DeSantis, and other state officials were then sued by the Florida Education Association, a statewide teachers' union; the NAACP; and several individual teachers and parents.

After summarizing the health risks of reopening schools during the pandemic, the judge wrote that the state's order to reopen schools "takes none of that into consideration. It fails to mention consideration of community transmission rates, varying ages of students, or proper precautions. What has been clearly established is there is no easy decision and opening schools will most likely increase COVID‐19 cases in Florida. Thus, Plaintiffs have demonstrated a substantial likelihood of success in procuring a judgment declaring the Order is being applied arbitrarily across Florida."

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Our "Facebookening of Oculus" series continues today with the announcement of the Facebook Connect conference as a free, live-streamed event on September 16. You may remember years of "Oculus Connect" conferences, which focused on the company's efforts in virtual reality and other "mixed reality" mediums. That conference is dead. It's Facebook Connect now.

In a Tuesday announcement, Facebook exec Andrew Bosworth cited the company's broader product portfolio as a reason to expand its conference's definition beyond Oculus. To back that claim up, however, he only cited two Facebook products: Spark AR, the camera-software toolset used to identify faces and add silly effects and filters, and Portal, the company's webcam-chat hardware platform. Having attended many Oculus Connect conferences, I can safely say neither of those product lines received much focus (and attending VR-interested developers didn't express interest in either).

Now it’s FRL, soon it’s FBOS?

What's more, Facebook used the Tuesday announcement as an opportunity to rename its entire Oculus VR division: Facebook Reality Labs. That name may sound familiar, since it was given to a number of skunkworks teams working on experimental VR-like features and hardware (including years of focus on 3D spatial audio at its Seattle-area office).

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  Some familiar controller designs show up in the patent imagery... [credit: Sony / USPTO ]

A recently approved Sony patent identifies a problem many console gamers may be able to identify with when moving between consoles: "To log in to their account a user is often required to enter a password, which may be seen by other users. Moreover, once a user has entered their password, a situation arises where the user remains logged into their account unless the user subsequently performs a log out operation, which can result in other user's [sic] potentially obtaining access to the user's profile."

Luckily, Sony's patent for an "apparatus, system, and method of authentication" also offers a solution: a new method for "determining an identity of a user holding a handheld controller" by detecting and analyzing that user's unique "manipulations of the controller."

Controller fingerprinting?

The full patent, filed by Sony in February and approved by the US Patent Office late last week (and first unearthed by SegmentNext), details how this detection system would rely on measurements of the controller's position, orientation, and the "closed or open state of a pressure sensitive switch" (i.e. pushing the controller's buttons). Analyzing how these values change over time for different users during standard gameplay can provide a unique signature, the patent suggests, which can be recognized the next time they pick up a controller.

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Something as simple as black paint could be the key to reducing the number of birds that are killed each year by wind turbines. According to a study conducted at a wind farm on the Norwegian archipelago of Smøla, changing the color of a single blade on a turbine from white to black resulted in a 70-percent drop in the number of bird deaths.

Wind power is surging right now, with more than 60GW of new generating capacity added worldwide in 2019. As long as you put the turbines in the right spot, wind power is reliably cheaper than burning fossil fuels. And most people would prefer to live next to a wind farm than any other kind of power plant—even solar.

Not everyone is a fan of wind turbines, however, because of their impact on local populations of flying fauna like birds and bats. Politicians with axes to grind against renewable energy say that we should continue to mine coal and extract oil because of the avian death toll, and US President Donald Trump has called wind turbines "bird graveyard[s]." Estimates from the US Fish and Wildlife Service calculated that approximately 300,000 birds were killed by wind turbines in 2015 (which is probably two orders of magnitude fewer than die as a result of colliding with electrical power lines each year), and bird deaths from turbines are trending down as the industry moves to larger turbine blades that move more slowly.

Enlarge / Satellite image of Hurricane Laura at 1pm ET on Tuesday as it crosses the Gulf of Mexico. (credit: NOAA)

It seems increasingly likely that Hurricane Laura will continue to intensify on Tuesday and Wednesday before making landfall along the upper Texas coast, or possibly southwestern Louisiana, early on Thursday.

Of all the many named storms in 2020—and we are on the "L" storm already with the early September peak of the Atlantic hurricane season still looming—this one has the potential to wreak the most widespread devastation yet. This is because Laura will likely become a major hurricane before landfall, reaching Category 3 status, and could potentially strike the populous Houston metro area.

That happens to be where I live, in a home about 15 miles from the coast. And as a meteorologist, all I can think is here we go again. Just three years ago to this very date, Hurricane Harvey brought record flooding to the Houston community and its surrounding areas. It became the worst flood storm in US history.

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Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a nice discount on Apple's AirPods Pro, which are currently down to $220 on Amazon. That's about $30 off Apple's MSRP and roughly $15 off the typical street price we see online. While we've seen the noise-cancelling wireless earbuds go for less in the past—Staples very briefly dropped them to $200 last month—this deal matches the lowest price we've seen on Amazon to date.

We recommend the AirPods Pro in our travel tech gift guide. Though we wouldn't say they're the best true wireless earbuds outright, they remain an excellent option for iPhone users who want active noise cancellation in this kind of cable-free design. They're still an upgrade on the base AirPods in almost every way, with more robust touch controls, a more comfortable in-ear design that creates a tighter seal in the ear, and noticeably more dynamic audio quality. They still pair easily with other Apple devices and provide a rock-steady connection once they're hooked up.

While the AirPods Pro can't match the best over-ear headphones in pure noise-cancelling strength, they're still effective at muting ambient sounds, and their "transparency" mode does a good job of layering in those outside noises with your music when needed. Their battery life is still just okay at five hours per charge, and their IPX4 sweat-resistance rating could be better, but later this year, they'll gain support for spatial audio and automatic device switching through a software update. Recent rumors suggest Apple won't launch a follow-up until later next year, so the current model shouldn't go out of date any time soon.