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(credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

The lawyers behind the Prenda Law "copyright trolling" enterprise have lost their key appeal and will have to pay more than $230,000 in sanctions.

The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit issued a 12-page ruling [PDF] upholding the sanction order that began Prenda's downfall, issued by US District Judge Otis Wright in 2013. Today's ruling defends Wright's sanction in its entirety and doesn't give one iota of credit to the copyright troll's claims that its due process rights were violated.

Prenda Law, masterminded by two lawyers named John Steele and Paul Hansmeier, operated by filing massive lawsuits against thousands of defendants, accusing them of illegally downloading porn movies. After using the subpoena process to identify the subscribers behind the IP addresses, they'd send threatening letters about the lawsuit. Many defendants settled, either out of fear of humiliation or inability to pay for litigation. Typically, they paid around $4,000.

(credit: Warner Brothers Animation)

Like the robber barons of the Gilded Age, some of the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley are using their vast wealth to try to transform the world according to their vision(s). Bill Gates has his foundation. Elon Musk wants us to ditch the fossil-fueled car. Both Musk and Jeff Bezos want space colonies. And Google's Larry Page? He wants those flying cars we were promised.

This week Bloomberg told us that Page owns not one but two flying car startups: Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk. Both companies appear rather media shy, but they seem to be working on small passenger aircraft that can take off and land vertically, according to reports from former employees, patent filings, and eye-witness accounts from Hollister Municipal Airport in California (where Zee.Aero is testing). The vehicles are probably using electric motors as well. "When the aircraft take off, they sound like air raid sirens," Bloomberg wrote.

Page's companies are but two among a score or more working on flying cars. There are old doyens of the field like Moller, which has been at it for more than 40 years, as well as more recent upstarts like Terrafugia and Aeromobil. It's certainly a lofty goal, but will it succeed? At the very least, it feels like some of the necessary enabling technologies are getting closer to being ready. Battery powered flight is achievable, as last year's English Channel crossing(s) demonstrated. Electric motors are smaller, lighter, and much less complex than jets, and the drone explosion serves as evidence that we can make ungainly shapes fly well even in the hands of amateurs, thanks to software.

The hammer comes down—at the workplace. (credit: Riot Games)

League of Legends creators Riot Games have never shied away from the fact that some of its players really, really suck. The company's "tribunal" answer to toxic behavior has paid big dividends in the past few years, but it hasn't zeroed out all rude players—which means Riot still had some recent data handy to connect the dots for an intriguing, workplace-related corollary.

The leading question: Does bad in-game behavior carry over to the workplace? Riot was in a position to know, since its staffers are also avid LoL players—and have apparently signed over permissions for their bosses to track their gameplay.

With help from Google's re:Work staff analytics team, Riot picked through the last 12 months of each staffer's LoL gameplay records and chat logs. The analysts found that in the case of fired employees, 25 percent of them exhibited significantly toxic in-game behavior. This wasn't a surface-level search for vulgar and hateful keywords but rather a deeper, context-specific analysis; according to re:Work, the worst behaviors included "passive aggression (snarky comments) and the use of authoritative language, sometimes using their authority as a Riot employee to intimidate or threaten others."

(credit: Getty Images | Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg)

The feud between Elon Musk company Tesla Motors and an auto blogger has sparked an indignant open letter from the company.

The feud started on Wednesday when Edward Niedermeyer posted on his blog, the Daily Kanban, that while investigating reports of suspension breakage in Tesla’s Model S and X cars he found something troubling. A poster in a Tesla Motors forum claimed the suspension in his 2013 Model S had failed. The car had 70,000 miles on it and was out of warranty, so Tesla apparently told the owner that the company would not pay for his repairs. Several days later, Tesla contacted him and offered to pay for 50 percent of the repairs if he agreed to sign a Goodwill Agreement. The agreement stipulated that the owner of the Model S would keep confidential the details of the incident and the work required to fix the car.

The Daily Kanban posted part of the agreement, which reads:

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(credit: US EIA)

The first three months of 2016 saw a plunge in the US' coal production that may be without precedent. The US Energy Information Administration, which has figures going back to the 1970s, shows only a single quarterly drop of similar magnitude—and that one came during a workers' strike back in the early 1980s. Excepting periods of labor problems, US coal production has not been this low since the EIA started tracking it.

Part of the problem is temporary. The winter was unusually mild, which lowers energy use in general. As a result, many of the coal-burning electrical plants had large stockpiles of coal on hand; they burned through these reserves rather than ordering new coal.

But most of the issues are systemic. Coal is now being undercut by renewables and natural gas, which are displacing some of the demand. Utilities are responding to those low prices by adding new renewable and gas capacity. That additional capacity comes at a time when the US' electricity demand has been growing at an unexpectedly slow pace. Combined, these factors have resulted in less use of existing coal plants. New environmental regulations are also forcing the oldest and least efficient plants to shut down early. Most of these are also coal.

(credit: Gatis Gribusts)

Last week, as Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin signed off on the first state law requiring drug companies to justify steep price hikes, Pfizer was in the process of raising the list prices of its drugs by an average of 8.8 percent, according to a Pfizer spokesperson. The price boost follows a similar one in January, which involved raising the list price of more than 100 drugs, some by as much as 20 percent.

Pfizer isn’t alone in this trend. Drug companies including AbbVie, Eli Lilly, Merck, and Bristol-Myers Squibb also continue to steadily raise prices across the board—although, it's happening at “modestly lower” rates than those seen in 2015, as FiercePharma reports.

The march towards ever higher drug costs continues despite strong public outcry. The firestorm has mostly centered on figures such as the executives of Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Martin Shkreli. The former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals became notorious for raising the price of a life-saving anti-parasitic drug by more than 5,000 percent as well a running an alleged Ponzi-like scheme. But soaring price increases is an industry-wide phenomenon.