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Winter ice rink in Marshall, Texas. The historic county courthouse is in the background. (credit: Joe Mullin)

Patent reform advocates who were hoping to "shut down the Eastern District of Texas" face disappointment today, as the top US patent appeals court ruled (PDF) against a venue transfer in a dispute between two food companies.

Tech companies and patent reform advocates have been complaining that they don't get a fair shake in East Texas, a rural district that's been a hotspot for patent litigation for more than a decade now. The case decided today, In re: TC Heartland, doesn't directly involve tech companies or East Texas, but it could have had a big effect on both.

The lawsuit began when Kraft Foods accused rival food company TC Heartland of infringing its patents on "liquid water enhancers." Heartland's defense lawyers asked to move the case from Delaware to TC Heartland's home state of Indiana, but a Delaware magistrate judge rejected the transfer motion. According to the magistrate, the fact that TC Heartland shipped about 2% of the accused products to Delaware is enough to allow the plaintiffs to sue there.

(credit: Marvel)

For many viewers, the introduction of Frank Castle—aka The Punisher—was the highpoint of Daredevil's second season. Played by John Bernthal, Castle takes a very different approach to ridding Hell's Kitchen of crime, choosing the kill shot over just crippling the bad guys. Evidently Marvel was listening to the chorus of fans calling for a full Punisher series; on Friday Entertainment Weekly reported that the comic empire has ordered just that.

Bernthal is actually the fourth actor to play Frank Castle, after Dolph Lundgren (The Punisher, 1989), Thomas Jane (The Punisher, 2004), and Ray Stevenson (Punisher: War Zone, 2008). The character is one of Marvel's grittiest, and those previous three adaptations did poorly at the box office. But we live in a post-Deadpool age, where comic characters no longer have to be PG-13. Not to mention that a series on Netflix enjoys freedoms denied to tentpole cinema releases.

This will be the sixth Marvel series to run on Netflix. We've already seen Jessica Jones and Daredevil, with Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and The Defenders all in the works. Certainly, Disney's acquisition of Marvel for $4 billion in 2009 continues to look like a clever move, particularly in contrast to how DC's catalogue is being translated into live action. Now if only someone would finally push the button on a Dredd series for Netflix...

Poorly maintained equipment, as shown in a union complaint about Verizon maintenance. (credit: Communications Workers of America)

Verizon says its network has suffered 57 incidents of vandalism in seven states in the two weeks since 36,000 workers went on strike. The "incidents of sabotage," mostly involving the severing of fiber optic cables or damage to terminal boxes, "have cut off thousands of Verizon customers from critical wireline services," the company said Wednesday.

Under normal conditions, there are only about a half-dozen incidents of sabotage over the course of a year, a Verizon spokesperson told Ars today. Verizon says it is still investigating the incidents and hasn't pinned the blame on anyone specific. But the company's announcement pointed out that "these malicious actions take place as Verizon is experiencing a strike."

Verizon reported similar incidents of vandalism during another strike in 2011.

Google's OnHub router just got a major new feature: IFTTT support. The demoed features let you do things like lock your doors when your device disconnects from the router or send an e-mail when someone connects to your wireless network. There are a few example recipes on this IFTTT page, or you can make your own using any of the channels supported on IFTTT.

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a service that lets you connect apps to other apps or connect apps to smart home devices. Developers for apps and services can build "If" triggers and "Do" actions that plug into the site. Users can make a "recipe" by combining these triggers and actions into a useful program, using the format "If [something happens], do [this action]."

Say you want to automatically tweet out a link every time an article on a website is posted. You can grab the RSS trigger function, so now you have "if a new item on this RSS feed appears, then [do this action]." Then you can combine it with the Twitter action and make "if a new item on this RSS feed appears, then tweet it out." Each trigger and action has its own configuration options, so you can do necessary plumbing like giving the "RSS action" the exact RSS feed it needs and giving the Twitter bot your login credentials so it can post from your account.

An artist's conception of Cassini, which carries a dust analysis system. (credit: NASA)

The composition of the dust between stars in our galaxy provides a window into some of the material that went into forming our Solar System. The local dust left behind from this process has been through many shake-ups in its history that have changed its composition; interstellar dust should be relatively pristine. For a long time, however, our efforts to understand interstellar dust have relied largely on inferences, as it’s difficult to directly observe the dim, diffuse material using telescopes.

Luckily, there is a way to get a direct measurement. There’s a cloud of interstellar dust near our Solar System, known as the Local Interstellar Cloud (LIC, sometimes called the “Local Fluff”). Some of it is streaming into our Solar System. This stream of LIC material was first observed by the Ulysses spacecraft in 1993, and grains of dust were captured by the Stardust spacecraft in the early 2000s and analyzed by a citizen science project.

The inward dust flow also passes by Saturn, where NASA happens to have a spacecraft with a dust collection system. This is Cassini, which was outfitted with that capability with the intention of capturing dust native to Saturn's rings. It just happened to be in the right place with the right tools to catch some interstellar dust.