In a Q&A with Japanese investors (helpfully translated by a NeoGAF user), Nintendo President Satoru Iwata has given the first public indication that his company has considered removing the region lock that limits playable software on the Wii U and 3DS to hardware sold in the same region.

In responding to a question about the practice, Iwata defended the historical reasons for limiting international interoperability, such as translation, marketing, and licensing issues. But he acknowledged that these are justifications that mainly apply to game makers and sellers while being a drawback for customers.

"As for what should be done going forward, if unlocked for the benefit of the customers, there may also be a benefit for us," Iwata said. "Conversely, unlocking would require various problems to be solved, so while I can't say today whether or not we intend to unlock, we realize that it is one thing that we must consider, looking to the future."

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Ground imagery showing the destruction of SpaceShipTwo. Kenneth Brown/Reuters

The Guardian has a good summary of how things are proceeding with the two-day-old National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation into the destruction of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, which occurred at approximately 10:12am PDT on October 31. Some eyewitnesses reported seeing an explosion when the craft broke up, prompting speculation that the accident had something to do with SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid rocket engine—an engine that was making its first flight with its new fuel.

However, at a press conference Sunday afternoon, acting NTSB chairman Christopher Hart said that crash investigators had already located the cause of the accident that injured 43-year old pilot Peter Siebold and took the life of 39-year old co-pilot Michael Alsbury: the spacecraft’s "feathering" mode had been engaged early. This put SpaceShipTwo in a high-drag configuration unsuitable for powered flight, and the craft then broke apart.

The feathering functionality is designed to be used in the later stage of SpaceShipTwo’s flight. It changes the shape of the craft, swinging its wings upward and allowing them to move to the optimum angle to slow the craft down on descent, like a shuttlecock falling to the ground in a game of badminton.

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Since Computex, there has been a lot of talk around Intel’s Broadwell-Y / Core-M CPU line. In August Intel treated us to a breakdown of the 14nm process and the Broadwell architecture including all the improvements therein, followed by a more succinct breakdown of the CPUs we should expect. These initial CPUs should be properly available to the public in Q4 in devices such as the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro using the Core M-5Y70.

The news this week revolves around more Core M CPUs being pushed through the system. This is most likely as a result of Intel binning the CPUs in sufficient quantities to satisfy customers. The specifications are available at ark.intel.com, but the Core M line now stands at seven different SKUs:

Intel Core M Specifications   5Y71
(New) 5Y70 5Y51
(New) ​5Y31
(New) 5Y10c
(New) 5Y10a 5Y10 Cores / Threads 2 / 4 2 / 4 2 / 4 2 / 4 2 / 4 2 / 4 2 / 4 Base Frequency / MHz 1200 1100 1100 900 800 800 800 Turbo Frequency / MHz 2900 2600 2600 2400 2000 2000 2000 Processor Graphics HD 5300 HD 5300 HD 5300 HD 5300 HD
5300 HD
5300 HD 5300 IGP Base Frequency / MHz 300 100 300 300 300 100 100 IGP Turbo Frequency / MHz 900 850 900 850 800 800 800 L3 Cache 4 MB 4 MB 4 MB 4 MB 4 MB 4 MB 4 MB TDP 4.5 W 4.5 W 4.5 W 4.5 W 4.5 W 4.5 W 4.5 W LPDDR3/DDR3L 
Support 1600 MHz 1600 MHz 1600 MHz 1600 MHz 1600 MHz 1600 MHz 1600 MHz Intel vPro Yes Yes No No No No No Intel TXT Yes Yes No No No No No Intel VT-d/VT-x Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Intel AES-NI Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

The new high end model is the 5Y71, offering a 2.9 GHz frequency mode and vPro features. The 5Y51 has slightly better specifications than the higher numbered 5Y70, but loses vPro compatibility. Both the 5Y31 and 5Y51  fill in the large gap between the 5Y10a and 5Y70 in the initial launch. All four new processors all have an improved base GPU frequency, up to 300 MHz, and are slated to work at a cTDP Up of 6W or cTDP Down of 3.5W, depending on the customer’s needs.

All new CPUs are slated for a Q4 launch, which would mean that they might become available for end users in products on the shelf sometime in Q1 2015.

Source: CPU-World

The Antarctic ice core, still in the core barrel. Mark Twickler

Selecting what kind of record to use when studying Earth’s climate history is a bit like selecting a camera lens from your bag. The choice depends on what you want to see, and your options are limited to what's in the bag. Some climate records are long but low-resolution—a wide-angle lens that shows you the big picture. Other records are short but high-resolution—a telephoto lens that lets you get a good look at that duck over there.

Ice cores have told us a lot about the glacial cycles the Earth has recently been through. Cores of Antarctic ice go back far enough to cover a number of roughly 100,000 year cycles. Greenland ice cores can only stretch back about as far as the previous interglacial warm period, but they show greater detail over short time periods because more snow falls there each year. However, wind-blown dust in Greenland’s ice compromises the tiny samples of atmospheric carbon dioxide locked in bubbles within the ice, making Antarctica the preferred source of information on CO2.

That’s fine for the big picture, but what if we want to learn more about precisely how CO2 changed during the transitions between glacial and interglacial cycles? To study these subtle shifts in Earth’s carbon cycle, you need to zoom in to shorter chunks of time than most Antarctic ice cores can provide.

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Ideal growing conditions means British fruit farmers are still harvesting strawberries into November.

'Ugh, cash only—I'll have the special.' Flickr user: jeanclaire

I live one block away from a McDonald’s that, up until this year, I never patronized. My neighborhood technically counts as a part of Seattle, but it’s just far enough away from the denser, hipper parts of town that it has room for big parking lots and giant chain stores—prime real estate for your Home Depots, your malls, your Mickey D’s. I’m not as chain-averse as many in the Northwest, but I still rarely heed the call of the golden arches.

Things started to change when I upgraded my personal smartphone to an LG Nexus 5 and started fiddling with the options menus. Since I never owned an NFC-equipped smartphone before, I took a deep dive into Google Wallet, wondering if the app would work at any nearby tap-and-pay kiosks. Ultimately, I loaded my credit card information into the app months ago then forgot about it.

Fast forward to a random, sunny day in which I went on a much-needed jog, the kind that lasted long enough to work up an appetite. I was close to finishing, and all I had on me were my phone and a pair of headphones—yet I knew I’d be returning to a house sorely lacking in food. Suddenly, there was that McDonald's. I had a hunch that a giant restaurant chain might be the perfect place to find an NFC-compatible payment kiosk, so I made the one-block-away pit stop. A crowd of teens watched as I tapped my phone on the McDonald’s register and paid $1.63 for a chicken sandwich.

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The Woodland Trust asks for votes to choose England's first Tree of the Year to compete in a Europe-wide contest.

A safety device on the Virgin Galactic spacecraft that crashed on Friday deployed early during the fatal test flight, US investigators say.

Journalist Mary-Ann Astle on Twitter (@mary_annastle)

Visitors to a number of UK libraries and museums—including institutions as large as the National Library of Scotland—were disappointed this week, met with empty display cases or blank pieces of paper where historical cultural artifacts should be. It's all part of the "Free Our History" protest organized by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), a response to copyright laws that make it difficult to display unpublished works legally.

"At the moment the duration of copyright in certain unpublished works is to the end of 2039, regardless of how old the work is," according to CILIP's change.org petition. "No other country in Europe has such restrictive provisions. European institutions are able to use such important historical material freely and lawfully, but in the UK we cannot." The copyright duration CILIP is referring to applies to unpublished works created before 1989 according to the BBC. CILIP's says an example might be a young girl's note to her soldier father during WWI.

The protest comes days after the UK's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) launched a new copyright licensing scheme aimed at fixing issues around "orphan works," or creative works where the rights holder can't be identified or traced. With that change, the government's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) can grant licenses so orphan works can be "reproduced on websites, in books, and on TV without breaking the law, while protecting the rights of owners so they can be remunerated if they come forward." (CILIP estimates up to 50 percent of archival records in the UK are "orphan works," and the BBC says 91 million such items exist in country.)

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The unrestricted use of fossil fuels should be phased out by 2100, if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change, a UN-backed expert panel says.

Eight men accused of participating in a same-sex wedding on a Nile riverboat in Egypt were handed a three-year prison term Saturday for committing "debauchery," state run media said.

Ahram Online reported that the Prosecutor-General Hisham Barakat viewed the one-minute video, said to be filmed in April, and concluded it was of two men getting married.

Eight men who were aboard the riverboat were detained in September after the minute-long video went viral on YouTube and other sites, Ahram Online said. They were jailed for broadcasting footage that "violates public decency," CNN said.

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EPIC 2014

Ten years ago this month, I saw an eight-minute video that I’ve never forgotten. It seared into my brain an imaginary corporate merger between two tech giants that never actually took place: Googlezon.

While the details of "EPIC 2014" were certainly off, its larger message about technology and media still rings true: the algorithms have won.

Back in the fall of 2004, I was a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Amazingly, hardly anyone was studying so-called "new media" at the time. We were all subdivided into "traditional" groups: newspaper, magazine, television, and radio. I was unusual in that I had an interest in tech reporting, but took classes from both the print and radio sides. While this approach is anathema to the way that journalism is taught today, each discipline was segregated—I never hung out with those weird TV kids.

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Full-size replica of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo shown at Farnborough Airshow.

Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson said that he plans to move forward with his company's plans to commercialize space travel just one day after SpaceShipTwo crashed in the Mojave desert on a test flight.

“We’ve always known that the road to space is extremely difficult - and that every new transportation system has to deal with bad days early in their history,” Branson wrote in a blog post on Saturday.

“Space is hard—but worth it,” he added.

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Artist's impression of the GG Tau A system, including the disks of gas and dust. ESO/L. Calçada

When Luke Skywalker stared off somberly toward the twin setting suns of his native planet Tatooine in Star Wars, he left some viewers with somber questions of their own. These questions had nothing to do with joining the rebellion. Instead, they were things like, "Could a planet like Tatooine actually exist? Can planets form in a system with more than one star?"

The formation of planets around their stars is a complicated business, and that’s when there’s only one star in the picture. Add two more stars and it can create problems for anything within their gravitational influence.

New observations of the triple star system GG Tau A addresses this issue, confirming theoretical models of planet formation in the process. The new data demonstrates that the system is capable of forming planets and suggests that planets may already be forming in GG Tau A.

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Stack Exchange

This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.

davidk01 asks:

When Murray Gell-Mann was asked how Richard Feynman managed to solve so many hard problems Gell-Mann responded that Feynman had an algorithm:

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Max Tegmark/MIT

Earlier this week, a cultural center in Red Hook, Brooklyn, played host to the sort of debate that's usually reserved for smoke-filled dorm rooms: do we live in a multiverse, and, if so, is there another you out there?

But rather than mind-altered undergrads, the debate took place among three physicists, one of whom happens to have a Nobel Prize sitting back home.

The debate was held at Pioneer Works, a nonprofit center that places artists' studios next to a space for scientists-in-residence, mixing in a high-tech microscopy company and 3D printers for good measure. It's mostly known for the classes it offers, which range from crafts like lock picking and programming to learning how to play a theremin. But Pioneer Works is starting a series on controversial scientific topics, and the multiverse is the first one it chose to tackle.

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Google's applications like Gmail, Camera, and Chrome are likely applications that came on your Android phone when you first purchased it. But unlike iOS where Apple has to ship an entire operating system update to update an application, Google's apps for Android can be updated right from Google Play. Google has been steadily updating their applications to take advantage of their new "Material Design" design principles that were shown off at Google I/O. With Android 5.0 Lollipop on the horizon, Google has to get the remaining applications up to date, and the latest application to recieve the new visual style is Gmail with its major update to version 5.0.

As you can see above, there's a lot of changes that come with the new Material Design interface. The most striking change is the the removal of the grey that was prevalent throughout the application. In the previous version, the color of an email preview changed to grey to indicate that the email had been read, while unread messages remained white. In the new design, the change between bolded or unbolded preview text indicates whether a message has been read. I personally find this to be much more aesthetically pleasing.

The header and status bar are now a nice moderately saturated red color that doesn't feel gaudy but brings more color into the interface. The circular button for composing a new email at the bottom also uses this red color. On the topic of circles, Google has begun to use circular contact photos throughout their applications, although in my case they just display the sender's first initial. If I had put in the effort to assign contact photos the new circles would display them where the squares previously did. 

Google has also redesigned the navigation drawer that houses your different inbox labels, and settings. The grey has been changed to white, and the top displays your cover photo from Google+ which seems to be a message from Google that you're supposed to change it from the default rainbow thing. 

The sliding drawer is a topic of debate right now because many applications implement it incorrectly, including many that are made by Google like the Hangouts application. Google's official guidelines state that the drawer is to slide in overtop of every other part of the interface except for the status bar. The new Gmail application implements this correctly, and I'm hopeful that every other Google application will be updated to adopt the proper design before Android Lollipop ships. It's very difficult to get developers to follow design guidelines when you don't set a good example with your own first party applications, and the navigation drawer in Hangouts has multiple issues with its design when compared to Google's guidelines. 

The last big change in the application is the support for adding email accounts from other providers like Yahoo, iCloud Mail, Outlook, etc. Any email account that supports IMAP/POP or Exchange can be added. This is a great feature as it eliminates the need to have to add every non-Google email account to the standard Email application which isn't given as much attention as Google's own Gmail app.

Prosecutors in Contra Costa County, directly across the bay from San Francisco, have filed criminal felony charges against a former California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer, Sean Harrington, who is accused of seizing and distributing racy photos copied from arrestees’ phones.

Harrington's attorney, Michael Rains, told a local NBC affiliate that his client has resigned from the CHP and was sorry for what he has done. Rains, who has a longstanding history of representing Bay Area law enforcement, did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment.

"This behavior is really not defensible,” Rains told NBC Bay Area. “It is impulsive, immature and inappropriate in every sense of the word.”

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Debris from SpaceShipTwo in the Mojave desert. ABC News

At a press conference this evening, officials confirmed the destruction of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and the death of one of its two-person crew. The air-launched spaceplane, intended to one day carry passengers for suborbital "space tourism" flights, left the ground at 9:20am PDT. At approximately 10:10am, SpaceShipTwo separated from its "mothership," WhiteKnightTwo. Approximately two minutes later, controllers noticed an "anomaly," and the flight was terminated as SpaceShipTwo broke apart.

Both of the two crewmembers aboard ejected from the spacecraft; one survived with serious injuries and was transported to a hospital, but the other perished. Although the names of the two crewmembers were not released, the president of the company that built the craft, Scaled Composites' Kevin Mickey, confirmed that both were Scaled Composites employees.

Representatives on hand during the press conference included officials from the Mojave Air and Space Port, Scaled Composites, Virgin Galactic, and local fire and police agencies. The officials delivered prepared statements and fielded a limited number of questions but deferred most substantial information until after the National Transportation Safety Bureau team could arrive. The NTSB is expected to begin its formal investigation at approximately 7:30am  PDT tomorrow morning, November 1.

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Time starts at the left and moves right, obviously. NASA

Time is something we're all very aware of. On my desk, I have no less than four devices that insist on telling me the current time. Despite this exactitude, we have very little idea about what time is and why it has only one direction, and it has turned out to be a remarkably difficult question to answer.

Like all good questions, this one lingers, like the contents in the back of a fridge. It haunts our dreams and desperately awaits someone strong enough to brave the mold and scrape out the pot.

Time and the laws of physics

What is this stuff called time, anyway? No one really knows. It's so embedded in our experience that we can measure its passage more accurately than just about anything else. But compared to spatial dimensions, we know nothing. Take, for example, the expansion of the Universe. This is space—the thing that provides room for us to move—getting larger. Somehow, space is stretching out and becoming bigger. This expansion occurs as a function of time, but... why is time not stretching out as well? Indeed, why is time even separate from space? Why can we turn left or right in space, but not turn "future" or "past" in time? It's simply an enigma.

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