The Sprout PC. HP

You know in Iron Man 2 when Tony Stark has JARVIS scan the diorama of Stark Expo and then manipulates a computerized version of the model with his hands?

HP today unveiled the peculiarly named Sprout, a PC that will let creative professionals do the same... more or less.

The Sprout projector houses a DLP projector, 3D camera, and a light. HP

The all-in-one desktop PC has an integrated 3D scanner that can digitize physical objects and a projector with a 20-inch touch-sensitive mat. The 3D scanner uses Intel's RealSense 3D capture, which combines the images from multiple cameras to construct its 3D models; it can also capture 14 megapixel 2D images. Both the 3D scanner and the projector point at the touch mat, creating a workspace enabling the "physical" manipulation of digital objects.

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With another 3,000 positions cut today, Microsoft's protracted series of layoffs is now at an end, according to GeekWire. A few more jobs may still be cut in early 2015, but the largescale redundancies are over.

Starting in July, the company eliminated close to 18,000 positions in total. After an initial wave of almost 13,000 layoffs, a further 2,100 people were cut in September and 3,000 more were cut today.

About 12,500 of the job losses are in the recently acquired Nokia Devices and Services business. Of the remaining cuts, some 2,700 were in and around the company's main campus in Redmond.

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Self-driving cars used to be a pipe dream, but then Moore's Law came along and did its thing. Within a few years, cars packed with sensors and processors and connected to the cloud will have the capability of driving themselves and reacting to traffic or accidents, at least under certain road conditions (think HOV lanes). Of course, that's only if the regulations are in place to let that happen.

What technological pieces of the puzzle remain to be worked out? Who takes responsibility when an autonomous car hits something? Are we about to fundamentally change society's relationship with the car? Join us today at 3pm ET for a live discussion on these questions and others.

Joining us today will be:

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DAHC

The Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) just returned an aerial surveillance balloon that it borrowed for two days in an effort to capture a man wanted for the murder of a trooper last month. Thomas Kelly, a PSP spokesman, told Ars on Wednesday that the “Blimp in a Box” was returned because it was ineffective.

"Due to the tree canopy and rugged terrain of our search area, the balloon was not as helpful as everyone hoped it would be,” he said by e-mail. “The tree canopy is too thick, we couldn’t see through it. It’s that simple. The balloon was offered to us as an alternative technique. We tried it and just didn’t work. It's best suited for open spaces, not heavily wooded forests.”

The manhunt is focused on finding Eric Frein, a suspected murderer now on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. Six weeks ago, Frein allegedly shot and killed a Pennsylvania trooper while wounding another outside the Blooming Grove Barracks in Pike County. After the incident, local and federal authorities named Frein, a local survivalist and amateur military historian, as the prime suspect.

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John Jackson

Pilots of drones or model aircraft could be fined or jailed for up to a year if they navigate near automobile racetracks or big sporting stadiums, the Federal Aviation Administration announced.

The Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) No. FDC 4/3621 is the first time US flight regulators have moved to criminally punish wayward drone pilots.

The rules—the first FAA update to pilots concerning sports venues in five years—reiterate an existing standard that prohibits pilots of all aircraft from flying under 3,000 feet and within three miles of stadiums from NCAA Division 1 football, Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and even big car races. The no-fly area is designated "national defense airspace" for one hour before and after events at these venues with 30,000 or more seating capacity. The new regulation does allow for the "broadcast rights holder" of stadium events to enter the no-fly zone with permission.

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NOAA

How did Earth develop its current atmosphere? A study published in the journal Nature Geoscience links the composition of Earth’s nitrogen-rich atmosphere to the same tectonic forces that drive mountain-building and volcanism on our planet. It goes some way to explaining why, when compared to our nearest neighbors Venus and Mars, Earth’s air is richer in nitrogen.

The chemistry of the air we breathe is partially the result of billions of years of photosynthesis. Plant life has transformed our world from one cloaked in a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, as seen on Mars or Venus, to one with significant oxygen. About a fifth of the air is made up of oxygen, but almost all the rest is nitrogen—completely unlike Mars and Venus. The origins of the relatively high nitrogen content of Earth’s air have been something of a mystery.

Geoscientists Sami Mikhail and Dimitri Sverjensky of the Carnegie Institution of Washington have calculated what nitrogen is expected to do when the churning cycle of plate tectonics cycles it through the rocks of the deep Earth. Active volcanoes not only shower volcanic rock and superheated ash as they erupt molten rock into the air; they also vent huge amounts of gas from Earth’s depths. The latest eruptions in Iceland, for example, have been noted for the amount of sulfurous fumes they have emitted.

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New York politicians say Comcast shouldn't be allowed to buy Time Warner Cable unless it provides free Internet service to all residents of public housing.

In a letter to the state Public Service Commission Wednesday, New York City Public Advocate Letitia James and 21 other officials asked for the free Internet promise and numerous other provisions, including a commitment to offer at least gigabit speeds to paying customers. The commission recently delayed its vote on the merger until November 13 after state officials found "deficiencies" in Comcast's customer service and the merger application.

James' letter asked Comcast to "guarantee that they will expand broadband to and provide free access, training, and equipment to their broadband services for all public housing residents of the New York City Housing Authority, and establish training and access centers for every housing complex within the merged entity’s service area." The same should be done for "[a]ll senior, youth, and community centers, and public parks. As well as all homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters (with anonymous browsing capability), congregate care facilities, supportive housing facilities, mental health group homes," the letter continued. Besides that, Comcast was urged to "[e]stablish free Wi-Fi service in all New York City Public Parks."

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A header on Lysol's home page.

While no more than four confirmed cases of Ebola have been diagnosed within the United States since September, that hasn't stopped the marketing team at Lysol from getting ahead of the disease. The company's October Ebola-related ad campaign peaked on Tuesday with the revelation that the company bought ad space on Google for any search of the term "Ebola."

Tuesday's Vice Motherboard report confirmed the targeted advertising via a screencap, propped above Google's default result from the CDC. The link, labeled "ad," asked Googlers to "learn the facts about Ebola from Lysol." Clicking on the link took users to the company's October 14 post about the disease. That post opens with a direct link back to the CDC and then recommends that Lysol be used "for surface disinfection in hospital settings to help prevent the spread of the Ebola virus." (The post also clarifies that Lysol's products have "not [been] specifically tested to kill the Ebola virus.")

However, if Lysol visitors don't click through to the CDC's official page on the virus, they won't see some of the most obvious safety recommendations and clarifications, including the rare, specific ways an average, non-hospital worker might contract Ebola—namely, through contact with contaminated fecal and mucus matter. It also doesn't recommend common safeguards like washing hands (even though Lysol happens to sell plenty of hand soap).

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Megan Geuss

Back in 2011 when I worked for PC World, Google gave me a Sprint Nexus S 4G review unit with the brand-new Google Wallet app on it. I set up a pre-paid card and took the phone around to a handful of retailers around downtown San Francisco, testing to see how paying with a phone worked in the real world.

The results were mixed: some interactions were fast and simple, but I went to a Peet's Coffee and an Office Depot where the terminals just didn't work. A few days after the article went up, I went to a Whole Foods where the terminal wasn't even plugged in, and the cashier directed me to another terminal nearby. All in all, it was clear that the system was a bit too rough around the edges to truly revolutionize the idea of the wallet. And I came away from the experience knowing that I certainly wasn't going to be leaving home without a wallet any time soon.

Three years later, Apple Pay has entered the scene with its own mobile payments platform. For the average consumer, the Apple Pay experience is not very different from the Google Wallet experience, except that retailers have had three extra years to get their act together and upgrade their terminals to adequately support NFC-based payments. Behind the scenes, Apple Pay does act quite differently from Google Wallet; see our “How mobile payments work” primer here for a more in-depth discussion of where Apple and Google fit into the card network and how tokenization works on Apple Pay. In this article, we'll just focus on the user experience.

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Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), a retailer-backed consortium, received a lot of attention this weekend when CVS and Rite Aid suddenly stopped accepting payments from systems like Google Wallet and Apple Pay. The two pharmacists reportedly made the move in solidarity with MCX, which is developing its own mobile payments system called CurrentC. CurrentC is set to launch in early 2015, although the app is already available.

On Wednesday, however, people who signed up to be on the forefront of the CurrentC launch were sent an e-mail saying that their e-mail addresses had been stolen.

“Thank you for your interest in CurrentC,” the e-mail read. “You are receiving this message because you are either a participant in our pilot program or requested information about CurrentC. Within the last 36 hours, we learned that unauthorized third parties obtained the e-mail addresses of some of you. Based on investigations conducted by MCX security personnel, only these e-mail addresses were involved and no other information.”

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streamishmc

It's hard to have a meaningful discussion about Apple Pay (iOS' most recent foray into mobile payments) and Google Wallet (Android's three-year-old platform that's had tepid success) without talking about how the systems actually work. And to talk about how those systems work, we have to know how credit card charges work.

It seems like a simple thing, especially in the US—swipe your card, wait a second or two for authorization, walk out of the store with your goods. But the reality is that a complicated system of different companies handles all that transaction information before your receipt ever gets printed.

The four-party system

If you're using a so-called “universal” card like Visa or MasterCard, there are typically four parties involved: the merchant, the payment processor, the merchant acquirer, and the issuer. Their roles are as follows:

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Flickr user: Vanessa Berry

Lumen View Technology, an organization that used a patent on computerized matchmaking to sue several small companies, has been ordered to pay almost $300,000 to Santa Barbara startup FindTheBest.

The patent holder was able to pull settlements out of several small companies, but when Lumen View asked FindTheBest for a $50,000 payout, it instead got hit with a RICO lawsuit and a pledge to spend up to $1 million to beat them. US District Judge Denise Cote found the Lumen View patent invalid in November, saying it described nothing more than a computerized version of "matchmaking," an ancient process. In June, she ordered Lumen View to pay FindTheBest's legal fees, ruling the case was exceptional.

After hearing from both sides, Cote has settled on an amount: $302,083.63. That includes $148,592 in attorneys' fees enhanced by a multiplier of two, as well as $4,899.63 in costs. They also have been awarded nine percent interest—a little bit better than your savings account, right?—beginning on May 30.

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Alyson Hurt

Comcast has agreed to pay $16.7 million and provide services worth another $33.3 million to end an 11-year-old class action lawsuit in which Philadelphia residents alleged that the company violated federal antitrust law.

Filed on December 8, 2003, the suit claimed that large cable companies such as Comcast “divided and allocated markets through a series of agreements ‘swapping’ customers and ‘clustering’ cable systems in geographic areas. Such conduct has allowed a cable company, including Defendant, in a particular ‘cluster’ to acquire or maintain monopoly power, raise prices, engage in anticompetitive conduct, and limit choice for cable consumers to effectively the only game in town—the cable services of the 'cluster' monopoly cable company.”

The case went through many twists and turns over the years, including a Supreme Court ruling in favor of Comcast in March 2013. The plaintiffs, who had been seeking $875 million, kept the suit going by moving to re-certify a narrower class of alleged victims. Comcast still denies the allegations but agreed to a proposed settlement.

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A 39,000 year-old baby mammoth named Yuka has been put in display in central Moscow making it the best preserved mammoth in palaeontology.

Throw traps, shoot guns, grind rails: that's the Sunset Overdrive way.

Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. If I stay still, the monsters attack. If I stop sliding down rails, bouncing off of car hoods, or rappelling over zip lines, everything falls apart—the music in my head stops playing; the electricity stops surging through my dodge-rolls; the fire stops spewing from my duct-taped battle-axe.

Welcome to Sunset City, a sunny, dilapidated corpse of a not-so-futuristic riverside metropolis. The place used to be overrun by selfie-snapping hipsters until they chugged a brand-new energy drink that turned them into crazed mutants (we mean literally, as opposed to the figurative craze of a caffeine high). Somehow, "you" (by way of a relatively robust character creator, which happens to sport the dumbest hairstyles known to man) avoided taking a sip, and now you must survive and escape the madness alongside the few remaining human survivors.

Unlike everyone else, of course, you come prepared. When you find high-powered weapons, like a freeze ray or a bowling-ball launcher, you're able to shoot everything in sight with remarkable aim. When you see a building edge, a zip line, or other grindable and bounceable objects, you become a lightning-fast, super-powered parkour master.

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The unclassified network of the Executive Office of the President—the administrative network of the White House—was breached by attackers thought to be working for the Russian government, according to multiple reports. The Washington Post reported that an investigation is ongoing, and White House officials are not saying what data, if any, was stolen from the computers on the network. “We are still assessing the activity of concern,” an unnamed White House official told the Post.

According to the Post’s anonymous sources, the breach was discovered in early October after a friendly foreign government alerted US officials. The network’s virtual private network access was shut down, and some staff members were told to change passwords. "We took immediate measures to evaluate and mitigate the activity,” the Post’s source at the White House said. “Unfortunately, some of that resulted in the disruption of regular services to users. But people were on it and are dealing with it.”

This isn’t the first time attackers, apparently sponsored by a foreign state, have targeted the White House’s network. In 2008 and 2012, Chinese hackers penetrated the White House’s network. On the first occasion, the attackers gained access to the White House’s e-mail server; in 2012, a phishing attack against White House staffers gave attackers access to the network, though officials said no sensitive data was exposed.

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Nintendo

There hasn't been much good news to report regarding Nintendo's financial situation since the company's historic annual loss way back in the 2011-2012 period. That may be changing, though, as strong sales of new Wii U and 3DS software helped raise the company to a surprising quarterly profit of 24.2 billion yen (about $224 million) in net income for the three months ending September 2014. That's quite a turnaround after a loss of over eight billion yen (about $74.2 million) in the same period last year.

Nintendo cited a few hit titles in driving the financial turnaround: newly released Super Smash Bros. for 3DS sold 3.22 million copies worldwide in September alone, while zany simulation Tomodachi Life sold an additional 1.27 million copies in the last six months. On the Wii U side, Nintendo noted that Mario Kart 8 has "continued to show steady sales," following its 2.82 million unit debut last quarter, and Hyrule Warriors has "gained popularity" following its Western release. Perhaps tellingly, the company didn't release specific sales data for those two Wii U titles.

On the console hardware front, Nintendo sold just over 600,000 Wii U units worldwide in the July through September period, pushing the system to 7.29 million units overall since its 2012 launch. That puts the total installed base for the Wii U roughly on par with that for the Xbox One, according to a recent Ars analysis. It's important to note, though, that Nintendo's system has had an extra year on the market to reach that sales figure, and the Wii U currently seems to be selling more slowly than the Xbox One on a monthly basis.

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Defendant Paul Phua YouTube

When the FBI applied for warrants this summer to raid three $25,000-per-night villas at Caesar's Palace Hotel and Casino, it omitted some key investigatory details that eventually resulted in the arrest of eight individuals, including an alleged leader of a well-known Chinese crime syndicate, defense lawyers maintained in Las Vegas federal court documents late Tuesday.

The authorities built, in part, a case for a search warrant (PDF) by turning off Internet access in three villas shared by the eight individuals arrested. At various points, an agent of the FBI and a Nevada gaming official posed as the cable guy, secretly filming while gathering evidence of what they allege was a bookmaking ring where "hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal bets" on World Cup soccer were taking place.

"If this Court authorizes this duplicity, the government will be free to employ similar schemes in virtually every context to enter the homes of perfectly innocent people. Agents will frequently have no incentive to follow the warrant procedure required by the Constitution," defense lawyers wrote the Las Vegas federal magistrate presiding over the prosecution.

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Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

Welcome to Ars UNITE, our week-long virtual conference on the ways that innovation brings unusual pairings together. Today, a look at the slow roll to autonomous cars. Join us this afternoon (3pm ET) for a live discussion on the topic with article author Jonathan Gitlin and his expert guests; your comments and questions are welcome.

Self-driving AI cars have been a staple in popular culture for some time—any child of the 1980s will fondly remember both the Autobots and Knight Rider’s KITT—but consider them to be science fiction no longer. Within the next five years, you’ll be able to buy a car that can drive itself (and you) down the highway, although transforming into a Decepticon-battling robot or crime-fighter may take a while longer. As one might expect, the journey to fully automated self-driving cars will be one of degrees.

Here in the US, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has created five categories of autonomous cars. The most basic of these are level zero, which might include your vehicle if it doesn’t have a system like electronic stability control. Fully autonomous cars, which can complete their journeys with no human control beyond choosing the destination, are categorized as level four. While level fours are still some way off, level three autonomous cars, which will be able to self-drive under certain conditions (say, an HOV lane during rush hour), are much closer than one might think.

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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry group that oversees the development of the specs used on the Web, today announced that the fifth major version of the hypertext markup language specification, HTML5, was today given Recommendation status, W3C's terminology for a final, complete spec.

The last version of HTML was 4.01, released in December 1999, making it almost fifteen years between updates. That's a long time to wait. The story of HTML5's development was a messy affair. After HTML 4.01, W3C embarked on XHTML, an update to HTML that incorporated various XML features such as stricter validation of Web pages and which was intended to make HTML "modular," broken down into a range of sub-specifications.

XHTML wasn't particularly compatible with the real world, however—Web pages that are, per the specs, broken are abundant, and under XHTML rules, browsers should refuse to display such pages entirely—and many in the Web community felt that W3C had lost its way and was irrelevant to the needs of real Web developers.

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