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(credit: bluepoint951)

Despite claiming that the government's definition of "broadband" shouldn't have been increased to 25Mbps,Verizon is now phasing out its 25Mbps fiber service and making 50Mbps the default minimum.

A year ago, the Federal Communications Commission voted to boost the definition of broadband from 4Mbps downstream/1Mbps upstream to 25Mbps/3Mbps. The definition affects policy decisions and the FCC's annual assessment of whether broadband is being deployed to all Americans quickly enough. Verizon unsuccessfully lobbied the FCC to keep the old definition, saying that "a higher benchmark would serve no purpose in accurately assessing the availability of broadband."

Verizon still offers speeds as low as 512kbps downloads and 384kbps uploads in areas where it hasn't upgraded copper DSL lines to fiber. Verizon DSL goes up to 15Mbps/1Mbps, if you're close enough to Verizon Internet facilities. Mayors in 14 East Coast cities including New York City recently criticized Verizon for leaving many customers with copper only.

Latham & Watkins partner Rick Frenkel, who represents Newegg in some of its patent cases. Frenkel and Cheng made a stop for BBQ and fried pies on a recent trip to the patent hotspot of East Texas. (credit: Lee Cheng)

A patent-holding company called Minero Digital seeks to exact royalty payments on a wide range of USB hubs, suing more than two dozen retailers and manufacturers last year. But the "non-practicing entity" dropped its East Texas lawsuit against Newegg subsidiary Rosewill within days of getting a call from the company's lawyer. It's not going to be easy for Minero and its president, Texas lawyer Daniel Perez, to walk away, though. Yesterday, Newegg filed its own lawsuit (PDF) against Minero in Los Angeles federal court, asking a judge to rule that Rosewill products do not infringe Minero's patent.

Newegg Chief Legal Officer Lee Cheng says the move is necessary since Minero dismissed its Texas lawsuit without prejudice, meaning it can refile the case at a time of its choosing.

"We just don’t believe Rosewill’s products and customers infringed on valid patent claims," said Cheng. "Minero’s case does not have merit, and its patent is not only expired but would suck even if it wasn’t expired. Now that they have started the litigation, it would be irresponsible for Newegg to not finish it."

The expression of a Faroese starling who's listened to too much vocoder. (credit: flickr user: Arne List)

Humans are obviously pretty special when it comes to language. One of our cleverest tricks is the ability to process the sounds of spoken language at high speed—even more remarkable when you consider just how variable these sounds are. People have very different voices and very differently shaped throats and mouths, which all affect the sound waves that come out of them. And yet we have very little trouble communicating with speech.

There are many ways to try to figure out how this wizardry evolved, but one particularly useful source of information is birds. Their evolutionary relationship to humans goes pretty far back on the family tree, so anything unusual we have in common with them—like vocal learning—is unlikely to be because of our shared genetic history. Instead, it's more likely to result from similar evolutionary pressures causing both of us to hit on the similar solutions.

This is why a paper in this week's PNAS is so fascinating: it found that songbirds process sounds in a way that is very similar to humans. Like us, they're able to process how all the complex frequencies bound up in a single sound relate to one another. It’s very close to how humans process vowels.

I dare you to think up a better image for a "PC gaming win." (credit: dno1967b / Flickr)

If you follow the business side of the game industry at all, you're probably sick of hearing how mobile gaming is a fast-growing business juggernaut destined to overtake all other forms of digital entertainment (in strict dollars-and-cents terms). So it might surprise you to hear that a new report shows the humble PC generated more worldwide gaming revenue than any other segment of the market last year.

SuperData's worldwide digital games market report uses sampled data from tens of millions of gamers, as well as publishers, developers, and payment providers themselves, to give us one of the best public estimates of overall spending on downloadable games. The bottom line for 2015: PC gaming is "an undervalued platform... contrary to the amount of attention that is generally paid to mobile gaming, total revenues from the PC gaming market is larger ($32 billion) than that of mobile ($25 billion)."

If anything, SuperData's measurement undersells PC gaming's revenue-generating potential, since it doesn't take retail sales into account (while retail sales are a small part of the PC gaming market these days, they're practically nonexistent in the mobile space). For some additional context, the worldwide market for console game software (which is still largely dependent on retail disc sales) was estimated at $25.1 billion, according to a NewZoo report. Even combining three major hardware platforms, console software still can't match the revenue-generating potential of PC games.

Astronaut Karen Nyberg gazes out of the International Space Station's cupola. A company, NanoRacks, wants to add a commercial airlock to the same module. (credit: NASA)

When NASA engineers designed the International Space Station during the 1990s, they didn’t envision the orbital outpost becoming a hub of commercial activity; nevertheless, that has become one of the most important contributions of ISS to US spaceflight. And as it nurtures American enterprise in low-Earth orbit, the station is increasingly running into a bottleneck: getting scientific research and other payloads outside.

Now a Texas company, NanoRacks, has proposed a solution. It is offering to build an airlock that will be attached to the space station and provide the capability to deploy cubesats and larger satellites. The $12 million-15 million airlock would also allow NASA to bring in costly large pumps and storage tanks for repairs, rather than disposing of them.

“We developed a commercial pathway to the station, and now we want to extend that pathway outside the station,” Jeff Manber, the company’s managing director, told Ars in an interview. “This is a sign that we believe in the future of the station.”