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(credit: Ford Motor Company)

Autonomous vehicles will likely become available in the near future, a reality that raises ethical questions about their programming. A new article published in Science raises a classical ethical question within the context of that new reality: should a car sacrifice its driver if doing so will save the lives of many pedestrians? The article found that participants generally do want cars to be programmed in this way for other drivers, but they don’t want their own cars to work this way. It’s a potentially lethal form of “Not-In-My-Backyard” for our more automated future.

For this paper, researchers conducted six online surveys between June and November of 2015. Participants were recruited through the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. Each of the six online surveys included approximately 200 to 450 participants.

Public good vs. individual behavior

In the first survey, 76 percent of participants said that it was morally correct for self-driving cars to sacrifice one passenger to save 10 pedestrians. That’s an overwhelming preference for cars to be programmed in a utilitarian way, reducing the overall number of casualties in an accident. These participants did not express any concerns about programming being too utilitarian.

2010 Volkswagen Jetta TDI Sportwagen photographed in Washington, DC, USA. (credit: IFCAR)

Sources speaking to Bloomberg and the Associated Press have said that Volkswagen Group will propose a $10.2 billion settlement in federal court next week. The settlement will reportedly include payouts of $1,000 to $7,000 for owners of certain diesel vehicles that included illegal software to help the company cheat on US emissions tests.

VW Group is facing over 600 lawsuits from customers, consumer protection agencies, and regulators. The suits are being overseen by US District Judge Charles Breyer in Northern California District Court.

In April, Judge Breyer said that VW Group would buy the 482,000 affected 2.0L diesel engines in the US back from owners in addition to paying out “substantial compensation” to affected customers. According to the AP, Volkswagen and Audi owners will be able to choose between having VW Group buy their car back for whatever the car was worth before the scandal broke last summer or keeping their car and letting the manufacturer fix it. It’s unclear whether VW Group will be able to find suitable fixes to make the affected diesel vehicles EPA-compliant. The source speaking to the AP said “any fix would be expensive and likely would require a bigger catalytic converter or injection of the chemical urea into the exhaust to help neutralize the pollution.”

(credit: vinylmeister)

A federal jury in Los Angeles on Thursday cleared Led Zeppelin of allegations that the band infringed the opening of the classic rock song "Stairway to Heaven."

The jury deliberated for less than a day after a trial that began June 14. The trial was based on claims that the famous intro to the 1971 song infringed the 1968 instrumental song "Taurus" from the band Spirit.

The case, in which tens of millions of dollars were at stake, including Led Zeppelin's reputation, was brought by the trust of Randy Wolfe, aka Randy California. The suit claimed Zep's opening to "Stairway to Heaven"—an acoustic guitar arpeggiating chords in a descending pattern—was a complete ripoff of California's "Taurus," which he wrote for the band Spirit. Zeppelin toured with Spirit in 1968, and California's complaint alleges that Zep guitarist/songwriter Jimmy Page had heard "Taurus" before the debut of "Stairway to Heaven," which appeared on Led Zeppelin IV in 1971.

(credit: Antoine Thibaud)

In the immediate wake of a weather disaster, people like to wonder whether climate change is partly to blame for the disaster's severity. The problem is that any meaningful, serious answer to that question takes time—so much time that public attention has moved on before we get an answer.

For one group of climate scientists, that unfortunate problem sounded more like a challenge. With a good plan and the right setup, the team figured it could quickly run the necessary climate model simulations and spit out some basic results. By comparing a virtual world where humans didn’t drive up concentrations of greenhouse gases to the one we live in, the models can be used to see whether there's any change in the weather patterns associated with the latest disaster.

At the end of May, the team got a chance to take its system for a test drive. Weather linked to a lingering low pressure system dumped rain on France and Germany. Three days of steadily heavy rain, following a wet spring, caused flooding on the Seine and Loing rivers upstream of Paris. In Paris, the water level in the Seine rose more than 6 meters (over 20 feet), prompting the evacuation of art from basement levels of the Louvre. In other areas, thousands of human beings were evacuated as well.

We can only imagine the Steam Summer Sale's header image will be loaded with more characters and activity by the time the sale closes on July 4. (credit: Steam)

Ladies and gentlemen, start your game-buying wallets: The annual Steam Summer Sale has arrived.

The online game shop's bandwidth is currently being slammed thanks to the popularity of this sale, but should you be able to load its launch page, you'll see an advertised discount on a whopping 5,199 games until the sale ends on July 4. Thanks to the launch of VR headsets such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, that makes this the first Steam Summer Sale to reduce prices on virtual reality games.

Not every major SteamVR game is getting a discount during this sale, but if you're considering throwing down hundreds of dollars on compatible hardware, you may appreciate saving a few bucks on such solid VR fare as the music-punching gem Audioshield, the stellar VR deathmatch game Hover Junkers, the must-own arcade shooter Space Pirate Trainer, the sword-and-shield quest game Vanishing Realms, the plane-management challenge of Final Approach, and the two-player puzzle fun of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. (That last one works fine without VR, as well, and we heartily recommend it.)

Part of an e-mail thread discussing workarounds to keep Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server from being blocked by security filters at the State Department.

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Documents recently obtained by the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch show that in December 2010, then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her staff were having difficulty communicating with State Department officials by e-mail because spam filters were blocking their messages. To fix the problem, State Department IT turned the filters off—potentially exposing State's employees to phishing attacks and other malicious e-mails.

The mail problems prompted Clinton Chief of Staff Huma Abedin to suggest to Clinton, "We should talk about putting you on State e-mail or releasing your e-mail address to the department so you are not going to spam." Clinton replied, "Let's get [a] separate address or device but I don't want any risk of the personal [e-mail] being accessible."

The mail filter system—Trend Micro's ScanMail for Exchange 8—was apparently causing some messages from Clinton's private server (Clintonemail.com) to not be delivered. Some were "bounced;" others were accepted by the server but were quarantined and never delivered to the recipient. According to the e-mail thread published yesterday by Judicial Watch, State's IT team turned off both spam and antivirus filters on two "bridgehead" mail relay servers while waiting for a fix from Trend Micro.