California has been hit by its worst drought in a century and many say the problem is only going to get worse.

California has been hit by its worst drought in a century and many say the problem is only going to get worse.

Players eager for new Mario Kart content won't have to wait for an entirely new game on an entirely new system this time around: Nintendo today announced the first paid downloadable expansion for a Mario Kart title, in the form of two Mario Kart 8 DLC packs planned for November of this year and May 2015.

The packs will be available for pre-purchase starting today at $8 separately or together for $12. Each one contains eight new tracks, four new vehicles, and three new playable characters. Players that buy both packs will also gain immediate access to eight new color schemes for Yoshi and Shy Guy.

The packs also represent the first major crossover content from Nintendo's other franchises to appear in the Mario Kart series. DLC owners will be able to play as Link from The Legend of Zelda, the Villager and Isabelle from Animal Crossing, and race in a kart inspired by the Blue Falcon hovercraft from F-Zero.

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Over 130 business leaders have written a letter in the Scotsman newspaper saying the case for Scottish Independence "has not been made".

BBC Newsnight's Stephen Smith visits Dover to assess how much of a threat buddleia is to native species

A number of Black Hawk helicopters were left covered in foam after a fire drill went wrong at a US military base in Oklahoma.

Seagate recently rebooted their NAS offerings, completely revamping their 2013 Business Storage lineup and dropping that software platform altogether. In its place, they adopted a Debian-based offering, NAS OS, development of which was started by LaCie prior to their acquisition by Seagate. In their 2014 lineup, Seagate has two classes of products, the NAS and the NAS Pro. While the former is suitable for workgroups of 1 to 25 clients, the Pro version pushes that up to 50. Read on for results from our evaluation of the 4-bay NAS Pro offering.

The BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Gaza City explains how day-to-day life is beginning to return to some kind of normality following the ceasefire agreed by Hamas and Israel on Tuesday.

France's newspaper front pages lament the country's 'crisis in the regime' as prime minister Manuel Valls is expected to form a new government.

Migrants from Africa and the deputy mayor of the town on the French coast on what to do with refugees at Sangatte camps in Calais.

A new law has been passed meaning that smartphones in California will be required to come with a "kill switch" to render them useless if lost or stolen.

While normally one might expect high end phones to get the latest and greatest features first, this time we see a bit of a surprising reversal. The Desire 510 is HTC's first 64-bit phone, and the first announced device with Snapdragon 410. For those that aren't familiar with Snapdragon 410, it has four Cortex A53 CPU cores running at 1.2 GHz, along with an Adreno 306 GPU which suggests that it is a mild modification of the current Adreno 305 GPU that we see in the Snapdragon 400. Overall, this should make for a quite fast SoC compared to Snapdragon 400, as Anand has covered in the Snapdragon 410 launch announcement.

While it may seem strange that ARMv8 on Android phones is first to appear on a budget smartphone, it's quite easy to understand how this happened. Looking at Qualcomm's roadmap, the Snapdragon 810/MSM8994 is the first high-end SoC that will ship with ARMv8, and is built on a 20nm process. As 20nm from both Samsung and TSMC have just begun appearing in shipping chips, the process yield and production capacity isn't nearly as mature as 28nm LP, which is old news by now.

At any rate, outside of the SoC the Desire 510 is a relatively standard budget phone. As this phone ships with Android 4.4 it's likely that it is running in AArch32 mode only, with AArch64 coming with Android L. The display is a 4.7" size, with FWVGA resolution (854x480) which makes for a rather low 208 DPI. This will be the cheapest LTE phone in HTC's product line, and also has support for a Dot View case. I've included the rest of the specs below, but for the most part the key point of interest is the SoC.

  HTC Desire 510 SoC MSM8916 1.2 GHz Snapdragon 410 RAM/NAND 1 GB RAM, 8GB NAND + microSD Display 4.7” FWVGA (854x480) Network 2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Qualcomm MDM9x25 UE Category 4 LTE) Dimensions 139.9 x 69.8 x 9.99mm, 158 grams Camera 5MP rear camera, .3MP/VGA FFC Battery 2100 mAh (7.98 Whr) OS Android 4.4 with Sense 6 Connectivity 802.11b/g/n + BT 4.0, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS, DLNA SIM Size MicroSIM

The only additional comment I have to make is that there is no 5 GHz WiFi. This is probably a WCN3620 part like the Moto G. While there's no word on pricing, HTC will have to price this near the price of the Moto G for it to be reasonably competitive. The Desire 510 should find its way to Europe, Asia, and the United States.

Version:next-20140827 (linux-next) Released:2014-08-27

With falling milk prices, companies are looking at other ways to make money, and Mengniu Dairy, China's biggest, has recently decided to venture into the yoghurt business.

Hewlett-Packard is recalling millions of computer power cords over possible fire and burn risks, the company announced Tuesday.

Customers who purchased a notebook or mini notebook computer between September 2010 and June 2012 may have an affected cord. Adapters sold during that time may also be affected. Eligible customers can fill out a form to receive a free replacement cord.

“HP believes that certain power cords shipped with notebook PC products and AC adapter accessories may pose a risk of a fire and burn hazard to customers,” the company stated on its website. “We are taking this action as part of our commitment to provide the highest quality of service to our notebook customers.”

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A farmer explains his relationship with his sheepdog, after researchers help unravel the mystery of how the animals do their job.

Many people in China are forgetting how to write their own language.

UPDATE: This story quotes a Netflix filing with the FCC that says, “Globally, Netflix delivers 99 percent of its traffic without payment to the terminating access network." Netflix told Ars after this story was published that the statement to the FCC is incorrect. Netflix has free connections to 99 percent of the ISPs that it sends traffic to, but the few ISPs Netflix does pay—AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable—account for more than 1 percent of the company's total traffic. The story has been updated to reflect this.

Netflix hates writing checks to Internet service providers—and luckily enough, it usually doesn't have to.Though the streaming video company has complained bitterly about having to pay Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable for direct connections to their networks, Netflix said this week that worldwide, it delivers traffic to 99 percent of ISPs without money changing hands.

The statement came in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission in which Netflix asks the FCC to block Comcast's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable. Besides AT&T and Verizon, those are the only ISPs that refused to give Netflix the unpaid connections, known as "settlement-free peering." In the months before Netflix agreed to pay these companies, video was sent over congested links, resulting in poor performance for subscribers.

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Leo Reynolds

Today, there's another signal that the days of "do it on a computer" patents may finally be numbered—at least if a defendant is willing to last through an appeal.

In an opinion (PDF) published this morning, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a lower court's decision to invalidate two patents, numbered 6,398,646 and 6,656,045, claiming to cover computerized bingo.

Yes, you read that right: bingo.

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Google today released a 64-bit stable version of its Chrome browser for Windows systems. The 64-bit support has been in testing since June, and as of Chrome version 37 it has made it to the mainstream version.

The 64-bit version offers three main advantages and one possible drawback. The browser's advantages are speed, security, and stability. Google claims that certain media and graphics workloads in particular are faster with 64-bit. It offers the example of VP9 video decoding—used for some YouTube high-definition streams—being 15 percent quicker compared to 32-bit.

Security is enhanced both through enabling new protection systems and making existing protection systems stronger. Windows has a built-in security feature called ASLR (address space layout randomization) that makes bug exploits harder to write by randomizing the location of things such as DLLs in memory. The 64-bit applications have much more memory available, thereby creating a much larger haystack in which to hide the needles that exploits look for. Google has its own protection systems that similarly try to separate different kinds of data in memory, and 64-bit likewise gives them more space to play with.

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