Valmyndigheten

Swedish democracy had its latest workout last Sunday, September 14, with the election of members to the national parliament (Riksdag), county council assemblies, and municipal assemblies. While established political parties drew most of the votes, Sweden allows (and then minutely chronicles) write-in votes. This process has created such venerable institutions as the Kalle Anka Partiet (the "Donald Duck Party," a common write-in), but it also lends itself to more mischievous uses—such as jotting down a bit of JavaScript on the vote form.

Valmyndigheten, the Swedish electoral authority, helpfully logs every single write-in vote across the country, then publishes the complete list on its website. In last Sunday's election, for instance, Swedes voted for:

• Satanistiskt initiativ
• Schizofrena autistpartiet
• Wisemans wisdoms
• Young volcanoes
• Vote for pedro
• Jesus kristus! vår frälsare som älskare oss, dog för oss vill oss det absolut bästa! Halleluja ("Jesus Christ ! Our savior loves us, died for us, wants the best for us! Hallelujah")
• Ett bättre Sverige för Allah ("A better Sweden for Allah")
• Bangkok bargirls
• Led Zeppelin

And, naturally, the "Cannabispartiet."

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New Zealand's governing National Party has won an emphatic victory in general elections, near-complete results show.

More than 6,000,000 people are spending a second day under curfew as the country struggles to halt the spread of the deadly Ebola virus.

The doors to the 2014 GameStop Expo held in Anaheim, California, last week. Sam Machkovech

Last week, during the third annual GameStop Expo, executives at the nation's leading game-focused retailer met with Ars behind the expo's floor of playable game kiosks to detail their plans for life—and revenue—beyond the sale of physical video games. As gamers have begun cozying up to a brave new world of downloadable, triple-A games, GameStop has responded with the recent acquisition of non-gaming, hardware-focused companies Simply Mac, Spring Mobile, and Cricket Wireless.

That's not to say the company is preparing for an imminent departure from the gaming space; between DLC card sales, next-gen hardware, and a 2013 victory over the threat of one-time-use codes, GameStop still has enough physical product to push in its 4,400 American stores. But our conversations with multiple GameStop executives revealed a somewhat surprising desire: to begin buying and selling used downloadable content.

"One of the questions, frankly, the industry is going to have to address going forward is [this]: 'Is the value of a digital game less than the value of a physical game?'" Executive Vice President Mike Hogan told Ars. "If you can’t trade in a digital game—which you can’t, at this point in time, but maybe you can in the future—there’s less residual value."

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Rains and floods from tropical storm Fung-Wong have left at least five dead in Philippines, and more than 200,000 people displaced.

Desmond Talkington

MonkeyParking, the Italian startup that allows iPhone users to sell public parking spaces via its smartphone app, has now set up shop in Southern California after being run out of San Francisco in June.

According to a blog post from nearly a month ago, which was only discovered by local media this week, MonkeyParking is now operating in the cities of Santa Monica and Beverly Hills.

The respective city attorneys did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment, but Santa Monica (the hometown of yours truly) told a local newspaper that it does not look favorably upon the company.

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Dozens of Turkish hostages seized by Islamic State (IS) in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in June have been released and arrived back in Turkey.

Tens of thousands of tourists remain stranded after Hurricane Odile swept through western Mexico, devastating resorts and destroying transport hubs.

Prince William is to visit Malta to mark the 50th anniversary of the country's independence from British rule.

An Egyptian man accused of helping to plan the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania has pleaded guilty in federal court in New York.

The lasers involved look nothing like these. NREL

One of the side benefits of the smartphone generation is that there is lots of interest in making new and better sensors. The current generation of smartphones comes equipped with accelerometers, gyroscopes, proximity sensors, and light sensors. Thanks to these, your smartphone knows its orientation, its motion, when it's in the dark, and when you put it to your face. It's a compass, a level, a location beacon, a pedometer, and much, much, more. We're told that wearable devices are the next big thing. These devices will be packed with even more sensors.

The sensitivity of sensors often depend on their physical dimensions: big gyroscopes can detect smaller changes in location and orientation than small gyroscopes. Likewise, long cantilevers measure smaller changes in torque than short cantilevers. This is simply because a change in torque rotates the cantilever by a fixed angle—the longer the cantilever is, the larger the displacement at the end, and larger displacements are easier to detect.

But a team of Canadian researchers have found that it's possible to make a relatively compact sensor that's also exquisitely sensitive—so sensitive, in fact, that it can detect the force exerted by a virus falling on it.

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French fighter jets have launched their first air strikes against Islamic State in northern Iraq as Kurds in northern Syria flee attacks by IS militants.

A federal judge in Texas has convicted a local man of conducting a massive Bitcoin-based Ponzi scheme, and ordered him to pay $40.4 million. The court found on Friday that Tendon Shavers had created a virtual bitcoin-based hedge fund that many suspected of being a scam—and it turned out they were right.

The Bitcoin Savings and Trust (BTCST) shut down in August 2012, and by June 2013 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed charges against its founder. In a statement at the time, the SEC said Shavers "raised at least 700,000 Bitcoin in BTCST investments, which amounted to more than $4.5 million based on the average price of Bitcoin in 2011 and 2012 when the investments were offered and sold."

Judge Amos Mazzant wrote:

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Charles Chan

When Alibaba stopped trading its shares on Friday, the Chinese e-commerce company had officially logged the biggest Initial Public Offering (IPO) in US history, raising $21.8 billion in its first day on the New York Stock Exchange. The company's earnings give it a market capitalization of over $200 billion, "putting it among the 20 biggest companies by market cap in the US," the Wall Street Journal notes.

Alibaba's IPO beat out record IPOs like Visa's $17.9 billion IPO in 2008 and General Motors' $15.8 billion sale in 2010. And Alibaba beat out its peers in the tech sector too, like Facebook (whose first-day earnings were $16 billion) and Google (whose 2004 IPO raised only $1.67 billion—paltry in today’s terms).

Earlier this month, the company announced that it would price shares at $66 per share. This morning around 12pm ET, the NYSE gave the go-ahead for the company, whose ticker symbol is BABA, to start trading. Shares started at $92.70, a third larger than what the company was aiming for, and ended the day at $93.89 after reaching a high of $99.70. In after hours trading, Alibaba is just down slightly at $93.60 per share, as of this writing.

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US President Barack Obama launches the new 'It's on Us' campaign, which aims to prevent sexual assault at American universities.

The US bureaucracy agreed Friday to restore a decade's worth of electronic federal court documents that were deleted last month from online viewing because of an upgrade to a computer database known as PACER.

The move by the Administrative Office of the Courts, first reported by The Washington Post, comes amid a fierce backlash from lawmakers who urged it to restore the data that is among the few methods of delivering court documents to the public. It's a paid service, costing 10 cents a page, and has long been criticized as a deeply dated system that already does too little and charges too much for online access to things like judicial orders and court briefs.

To be restored are, combined, about a decade's worth of court dockets and all manner of documents at the US Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 7th, 11th, and Federal Circuits, as well as the Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California.

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Don McCullough

The Federal Aviation Administration has blocked plans for a small drone to deliver the game football for the University of Michigan kickoff Saturday against the University of Utah before a crowd of about 110,000 fans.

The FAA's move is the latest example of flight regulators blocking the use of small drones for commercial purposes, despite the questionable legal authority for them to do so. The drone, built by Ann Arbor-based SkySpecs, was supposed to participate in a pre-game program of the American football game to celebrate the University of Michigan's 100-year anniversary of its aerospace-engineering program.

Bloomberg News said that after the FAA explained its rules, "the school backed down."

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A wildfire in California has doubled in size in just 12 hours, forcing thousands to leave their homes. Kaitlin Lewis of KFBK Radio News is in Sacramento near the site of the fire.

Eight members of a team trying to raise awareness about Ebola have been killed by villagers using machetes and clubs in Guinea, officials say.

In the crazy rush to wrap up the GeForce GTX 980 review in time for the NDA lift yesterday, news of the first R343 driver release may have been lost in the shuffle. This is a full WHQL driver release from NVIDIA, and it's available for Windows 8.1, 7, Vista, and even XP (though I don't know what you'd be doing with a modern GPU on XP at this point). Notebooks also get the new drivers, though only for Windows 7 and 8 it seems. You can find the updates at the usual place, or they're also available through GeForce Experience (which has also been updated to version 2.1.2.0 if you're wondering).

In terms of what the driver update provides, this is the Game Ready driver for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, The Evil Within, F1 2014, and Alien: Isolation – all games that are due to launch in early to mid-October. Of course this is also the publicly available driver for the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970, which are apparently selling like hotcakes based on the number of "out of stock" notifications we're seeing (not to mention some hefty price gouging on the GTX 970 and GTX 980).

The drivers also enable NVIDIA's new DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution), with hooks for individual games available in the Control Panel->Manage 3D Settings section. It's not clear whether DSR will be available for other GPUs, but it's definitely not enabled on my GTX 780 right now and I suspect it will be limited to the new Maxwell GM204 GPUs for at least a little while.

There are a host of other updates, too numerous to go into, but you can check the release notes for additional information. These drivers also drop support for legacy GPUs (anything from the 300 series and older), so if you're running an older GPU you'll need to stay with the previous driver release.

Update: 334.16 is now available for the GTX 900 series. These drivers include the fixes to resolve the compatibility issues we were seeing with the GTX 970