Silicon Mechanics, Inc., announced this week that Wayne State University (WSU) is the recipient of the company’s 3rd Annual Research Cluster Grant. This includes donation of a complete high-performance compute cluster from Silicon Mechanics and several of its partners. more>>

Note: This is an example of a Glock gun, not the actual one found by police. Adam D

Installation fees have caught many cable customers by surprise, but rarely do service calls end with a customer stealing a technician's tools and whipping out a firearm.

But that's just what happened Monday in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when a Comcast worker went to the home of Gloria Baca-Lucero, according to a criminal complaint filed in Bernalillo County Metropolitan Court.

"Baca-Lucero, 48, was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon Monday and booked into jail," the Albuquerque Journal reported today. "She was released later that day."

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A Hachette title currently being sold at $14.99, the price Amazon is fighting against.

As the war between Amazon and Hachette carries on, the Amazon Books team released a longer explanation Tuesday of what it's trying to accomplish by stonewalling the publisher. The gist of Amazon's claims is that e-books need to be cheaper because cheaper books sell more volume, resulting in a larger "total pie" that gets consumers lower prices.

The New York Times first highlighted Amazon's interference with Hachette book sales at the end of May, which involved the company systematically making books unavailable or shipping them very slowly. Hachette has yet to mount a formal defense for holding the line on what was long suspected to be e-book price fixing on Amazon's store. The public has tended to take Hachette's side.

Meanwhile, Amazon has already defended its actions in a forum post, saying that "stocking and assortment decisions" based on publisher relationships are typical for a retailer. In Hachette's case, Amazon implied, it doesn't seem fit to bestow the publisher with shipments or good featured placement on its virtual shelves. In the meantime, Amazon encouraged readers to buy Hachette books elsewhere or even get them secondhand. "If you order 1,000 items from Amazon, 989 will be unaffected by this interruption," the company wrote in May.

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Google bosses in one of the company's autonomous cars back in 2011. Google

Following the lead of the United States, the United Kingdom has announced that it will allow driverless cars to be tested on British roads starting in January 2015.

In a Wednesday announcement, the UK Department of Transportation said that up to three cities would be selected to host trials. They will be awarded a total of nearly $17 million to cover the costs of such tests.

“Driverless cars have huge potential to transform the UK’s transport network—they could improve safety, reduce congestion and lower emissions, particularly CO2,” Transport Minister Claire Perry said in a statement. “We are determined to ensure driverless cars can fulfill this potential, which is why we are actively reviewing regulatory obstacles to create the right framework for trialling these vehicles on British roads.”

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If ICANN's motion fails, the plaintiffs would seize all .IR domains, including President.ir, as shown here. President.ir

The global body in charge of domain names, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), has asked a federal court to prevent the handover of the country code top-level domain names (ccTLD) of North Korea, Syria, and Iran as part of a terrorism lawsuit dating back over a decade. Those would include the .KP, .SY and .IR names.

The case, formally known as Rubin et al v. Islamic Republic of Iran et al, goes back to a 1997 suicide bombing that took place in Jerusalem. Four Americans were injured in the attack, for which Hamas claimed responsibility. Given that Iran has supported, and continues to support, Hamas in its resistance against Israel, the plaintiffs sued the Islamic Republic, arguing that the Iranian government actually was liable.

It’s unclear why exactly the plaintiffs also seek the Syrian and North Korean ccTLDs as part of this lawsuit. Neither ICANN’s attorneys nor the plaintiffs' attorneys immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment.

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Earlier this year I upgraded to the new Yoga 2 Pro, an Ultrabook with pretty typical specifications. The screen is one of the key differentiators with a QHD+ 3200x1800 resolution, four times the pixels of the original Yoga. After using the laptop for many months now, it's a very interesting experience, as the flexible chassis works as both a traditional laptop or a touch input tablet. Read on to find out what it's like living with the Yoga 2 Pro, and how it measures up in our suite of benchmarks.

A northeaster—a common type of storm on the East Coast—causes severe flooding in Virginia. Virginia Sea Grant

The warming of the planet is driving ocean levels upward through two processes: the melting of land-based ice and the thermal expansion of the water in the oceans. Due to the vast energies involved, both of these processes are slow, so the ocean levels have only been creeping up a few millimeters a year. That slow pace makes it difficult for anyone to perceive the changes.

But it's clear that those changes are taking place. In the latest indication, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has compiled data on what it calls "nuisance floods," cases where coastal communities have to deal with flooding as a result of high tides or minor storms. Over the last 50 years, instances of these floods along the East Coast have gone up by anywhere from 300 to 900 percent.

On the rare occasions where sea level rise reaches the public's consciousness, it's typically as a result of a catastrophic event like Hurricane Sandy. Sea level rise does exacerbate these events, as the flooding reaches higher levels and extends over a wider area than it would have a century earlier. But the rarity and magnitude of catastrophes like these make it difficult for people to associate them with a gradual process. At the same time, the immediate effect of the process itself—high tides being about an inch higher every decade—is difficult for humans to perceive. As NOAA's new report puts it, "neither changes in tidal datum elevations nor rare-event probabilities are readily apparent to the casual observer."

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Julienning

Officials with the Tor privacy service have uncovered an attack that may have revealed identifying information or other clues of people operating or accessing anonymous websites and other services over a five-month span beginning in February.

The campaign exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in the Tor protocol to carry out two classes of attack that together may have been enough to uncloak people using Tor Hidden Services, an advisory published Wednesday warned. Tor officials said the characteristics of the attack resembled those discussed by a team of Carnegie Mellon University researchers who recently canceled a presentation at next week's Black Hat security conference on a low-cost way to deanonymize Tor users. But the officials also speculated that an intelligence agency from a global adversary might have been able to capitalize on the exploit.

Either way, users who operated or accessed hidden services from early February through July 4 should assume they are affected. Tor hidden services are popular among political dissidents who want to host websites or other online services anonymously so their real IP address can't be discovered by repressive governments. Hidden services are also favored by many illegal services, including the Silk Road online drug emporium that was shut down earlier this year. Tor officials have released a software update designed to prevent the technique from working in the future. Hidden service operators should also consider changing the location of their services. Tor officials went on to say:

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The Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies—a nonprofit group—has initiated a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Ford and General Motors targeting the automakers’ in-car hard drive-based CD ripping technology. The lawsuit (full text) alleges that Ford and GM’s devices fail to comply with the terms of the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 and that the AARC is due "injunctive relief and damages" because of that alleged noncompliance.

The problem with the suit, as outlined in a scathing response from Techdirt, is that the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 was specifically written to allow exactly the kind of personal copying that in-car CD-ripping audio units perform. This was further cemented in 1999 with the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeal’s RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Systems decision, which threw the weight of judicial precedent behind the notion that devices designed to make copies of copyrighted audio for personal use (as opposed to serial copies for distribution) are legal and exempt from licensing fees.

With its July 25 suit, the AARC alleges that Ford’s in-car "Jukebox" feature and GM’s in-car "Hard Drive Device" are purpose-built "Digital Audio Recording Devices" and therefore are subject to lots of additional regulation. Specifically, the suit states that both Ford’s Jukebox and GM’s Hard Drive Device fail to implement the Serial Copy Management System copy protection scheme and that both Ford and GM have failed to pay the appropriate AHRA-mandated royalties on their devices.

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The Modbook Pro X would be an expensive entry in a crowded niche. Modbook Inc.

Before the iPad, people who wanted an Apple tablet could buy something called the "Modbook" from a company named Axiotron. For $2,279, the company would take a regular white plastic MacBook, take it apart, and reassemble it inside a purpose-built tablet case with a Wacom digitizer and stylus installed. After some financial trouble and the launch of an actual Apple tablet, Axiotron became Modbook Inc., and the company launched the Modbook Pro, which did for the 13-inch MacBook Pro what the Modbook did for the standard Macbook.

Today the company is ready to announce the third iteration of the Modbook, kind of. The Modbook Pro X takes the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro (including the refreshed models introduced yesterday), makes some modifications to its specs, and puts it into a tablet case. Like past Modbooks, the Modbook Pro X is designed to appeal to artists and other creative professionals who would like to draw directly on their tablet screens without having to use a separate drawing tablet. The catch? This project currently exists only as a Kickstarter project, with no guarantee the product will see the light of day if it doesn't hit its $150,000 funding goal.

The Modbook as a tablet. Modbook Inc.

The Modbook Pro X will preserve all of the original ports and the CPU, GPU, and screen specs of the 2013 Retina MacBook Pro, crammed into a black tablet that's 0.7 inches thick and weighs 4.95 pounds, around half a pound heavier than the Retina MacBook Pro is by itself. The screen will be covered by a digitizer that supports 2,048 different pressure levels, and the Modbook will come with software installed to take advantage of the digitizer hardware. Optional "keybars," small rows of keys mounted to the back of the tablet, will provide keyboard hotkey shortcuts that users can press without interrupting whatever they're sketching onscreen.

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Professor of planetary sciences Ian Garrick-Bethell explains what gave the Moon its unusually distorted shape.

On this heat map, scholars plotted each justice serving since the '50s and for each year added a shaded box. The more green the cell, the more predictable the justice was that year. The method performed well at predicting certain justices and not as well on others, with a 70.9 percent accuracy rating overall. Josh Blackman's Blog

A legal scholar says he and colleagues have developed an algorithm that can predict, with 70 percent accuracy, whether the US Supreme Court will uphold or reverse the lower-court decision before it.

"Using only data available prior to the date of decision, our model correctly identifies 69.7 percent of the Court’s overall affirm and reverse decisions and correctly forecasts 70.9% of the votes of individual justices across 7,700 cases and more than 68,000 justice votes," Josh Blackman, a South Texas College of Law scholar, wrote on his blog Tuesday.

While other models have achieved comparable accuracy rates, they were only designed to work at a single point in time with a single set of nine justices. Our model has proven consistently accurate at predicting six decades of behavior of thirty Justices appointed by thirteen Presidents. It works for the Roberts Court as well as it does for the Rehnquist, Burger, and Warren Courts. It works for Scalia, Thomas, and Alito as well as it does for Douglas, Brennan, and Marshall. Plus, we can predict Harlan, Powell, O’Connor, and Kennedy.

Given that there isn't much wagering action out there for Supreme Court decisions, Blackman says there's other real-world applications, like helping high court litigators develop strategies to overcome the model.

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Yesterday's announcement of Electronic Arts' EA Access program was notable for being the first such subscription-based game download plan from a third-party publisher on this generation of consoles. But it was also notable for the fact that the subscription is only available on the Xbox One and not the PlayStation 4 (or on PC via Origin, for that matter). Today, Sony is suggesting that it doesn't think EA's subscription plan is as good a value as its own PlayStation Plus offerings.

“We evaluated the EA Access subscription offering and decided that it does not bring the kind of value PlayStation customers have come to expect,” a Sony representative told Game Informer. "PlayStation Plus memberships are up more than 200% since the launch of PlayStation 4, which shows that gamers are looking for memberships that offer a multitude of services, across various devices, for one low price. We don’t think asking our fans to pay an additional $5 a month for this EA-specific program represents good value to the PlayStation gamer."

It's true that PlayStation Plus is an incredible value as far as these kinds of subscriptions go. Players who have subscribed since the service was first rolled out in 2010 would today have access to hundreds of downloadable games across all of Sony's hardware, at a total cost of around $200 so far and with the promise of multiple new games every single month going forward (Microsoft's more recent Games With Gold has been a little less generous). EA Access, on the other hand, currently only gives access to four of EA's older games for $30 a year, with no guarantees about which titles will be added in the future or how long after release those titles will be available via the "Vault." Since the program is limited to EA titles, it seems unlikely that its selection will ever be nearly as extensive as something like PlayStation Plus.

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A 3D duck in the latest version of LibreOffice Impress. Document Foundation

LibreOffice's latest release provides easier ways of working with spreadsheets and the ability to insert 3D models into presentations, along with dozens of other changes.

LibreOffice was created as a fork from OpenOffice in September 2010 because of concerns over Oracle's management of the open source project. LibreOffice has now had eight major releases and is powered by "thousands of volunteers and hundreds of developers," the Document Foundation, which was formed to oversee its development, said in an announcement today. (OpenOffice survived the Oracle turmoil by being transferred to the Apache Software Foundation and continues to be updated.)

In LibreOffice 4.3, spreadsheet program Calc "now allows the performing of several tasks more intuitively, thanks to the smarter highlighting of formulas in cells, the display of the number of selected rows and columns in the status bar, the ability to start editing a cell with the content of the cell above it, and being able to fully select text conversion models by the user," the Document Foundation said.

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It hasn't been long since Microsoft began their rollout of the Windows Phone 8.1 update but they are already giving details of the next update which is slated to roll out in the coming months. The update isn't as significant as Windows Phone 8.1 was, but it still brings some good improvements to the platform. Cortana has been improved and is being rolled out to new countries with localization to make it more usable for different people in different parts of the world. Folders have been implemented in a clever way as well, and there are a whole bunch of other additions throughout the OS. We've detailed some of the bigger changes below, starting with Cortana.

Microsoft's virtual assistant, Cortana, is making its way to several different countries with this new update. Microsoft has put some focus on bringing the feature to the Chinese market with more localized information that would be relevant to someone living in China. The Chinese version of Cortana supports Mandarin Chinese for voice, text, and speech, but Microsoft is also including special features like an alternate form with a different appearance, different animations, and different sounds. Cortana in China also provides information like air quality on weather cards, information about driving restrictions, and the ability to track local TV shows and celebrities, all of which are features Microsoft hopes will make Cortana more useful to users in China.

Microsoft has done the same sort of thing for the new UK version, with a British accent and British English spelling in Cortana. Locally relevant info like info from the London Stock Exchange and local sport statistics are also included. 

With the new update Cortana will also be rolling out to Canada, India, and Australia as an alpha. Users will have to choose between using Cortana with the US or UK English language model as Microsoft is not finished with any localization in those regions.

The big feature addition of this update is one that users have been asking for since the days of Windows Phone 7. Folders are coming to Windows Phone and Microsoft's implementation is clever by not destroying the functionality of live tiles within a folder. The folder takes up a dynamic amount of space on the home screen and the space is made up of all the live tiles within that folder along with a folder name running along the bottom. The user can make certain apps appear bigger or smaller depending on their importance and arrange them however they like. When tapped the folder expands to show all the tiles at their normal size.

Beyond that there are various improvements to parts of the OS. The Windows Phone Store now has a live tile that updates to show new apps and games that have been added to the store, the SMS app gains the ability to select multiple messages for forwarding or deletion, and there's a new apps corner section in the settings app which allows the user to set up a mode with restrictions to what apps can be used. Microsoft is hoping the apps corner feature will make it easier to deploy Windows Phone devices in business scenarios where only a few apps needs to be accessed like for barcode scanning and inventory management at a distribution center.

The last thing Microsoft detailed are improvements to privacy and security features.The new update to Windows Phone will include VPN support to better keep information secure when connecting to wireless networks like public hotspots where the user doesn't want to expose themselves to other users that may be on the network.

Microsoft's time frame for when the update will be released is just described as "in the coming months." For users running the Windows Phone 8.1 developer preview, the preview of this latest update will begin to roll out next week.

Last month, when Nintendo announced it had quickly sold more than two million copies of Mario Kart 8, we noted that we'd have to wait to see if those sales were coming primarily from existing Wii U owners or if the game was driving new console sales on its own. Nintendo's latest quarterly earnings report shows that while Mario Kart 8 has led to an increase in Wii U hardware sales, it wasn't nearly enough of a boost to return the company to profitability.

Worldwide, Nintendo sold 510,000 units of the Wii U in the three months from April to June. That's a substantial improvement from the tepid 160,000 it sold during the same period last year and a smaller bump from the 310,000 it sold during the January to March quarter of 2014. But those kinds of numbers aren't going to help the Wii U look like a real contender with competition like the PlayStation 4, which was selling a million consoles a month as recently as April, or even the Xbox One, which shipped just over one million consoles in the first quarter of 2014 (though, to be fair, neither competitor has broken out current console sales numbers for the second quarter of the year).

The improved console hardware sales weren't enough to bump Nintendo back to the profitability it has been seeking to reclaim for years now, either. The company reported a ¥9.4 billion operating loss for the quarter (about $92 million), even worse than the ¥4.9 billion (about $47 million) quarterly loss from a year prior. Nintendo attributes that loss partly to the lack of new Wii U software to go along with the success of Mario Kart 8. Indeed, in North America, the Wii U saw just five new games released during the three-month period, and Mario Kart 8's 2.82 million sales represented a full 64 percent of the total Wii U software sales for the quarter. That's even more striking when you consider that Mario Kart was only out for a month during the reporting period.

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Brook Dain

Earlier this year, the San Jose Police Department (SJPD) became one of the first local law enforcement agencies in California—and one of the few in the country—to acquire a drone.

According to new documents acquired and published Tuesday by MuckRock and Vice, the SJPD acquired a Hexacopter called the Century Neo 660 along with a GoPro video camera, live video transmitter, and more. The nearly $7,000 January purchase was funded through a grant from the Bay Area Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI), a regional arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The Century Neo 660, and others like it, typically have a flight time of less than 30 minutes depending on motor and battery configuration. However, the drone doesn't appear to be in use for the time being, according to a July 25, 2014 letter from the SJPD to MuckRock, stating “the program relating to drones has not been implemented yet.” San Jose is the third-largest city in the Golden State, and it's the tenth-largest in the United States.

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Iowa State

Drugs interact with our brain in profound ways, even when their target is a completely different part of the body. The brain is essential for making sure that placebos work, as well as generating the nocebo effect, where harmful side effects appear in cases where no drug has been taken. It's probably not much of a reach to expect that the brain will also influence how long people think the effects of a drug will last.

The unexpected twist is that researchers have now shown that we think drugs will wear off faster when we're working harder. And, given the chance to self-medicate, we'll keep popping pills as long as things are stressful or difficult.

Researchers at the Baruch College and the London School of Economics were inspired in part by a question someone asked on a medical advice site as to whether the exertion experienced during yoga might reduce the effectiveness of botox injections. The researchers suspected that this sort of reasoning might derive from daily experience—after all, people see that driving faster uses up gas more quickly. So they decided to test the theory.

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Nitin Srivastava reports from the barricaded town of Saharanpur where the situation remains tense.

Don Hankins

Last month, a Facebook social experiment from 2012 came to light, drawing equal parts ire and intrigue as users discussed whether the social network site had crossed too many ethical lines. The internal research study concluded that users' emotional states could reflect the content they saw in their news feed, and it confirmed that hypothesis by manually manipulating what appeared in people's feeds—to the tune of hundreds of thousands—to coerce happier or sadder states.

On Monday, dating site OKCupid responded to the Facebook story. "Guess what, everybody: If you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site," site co-founder Christian Rudder wrote before unveiling three so-called experiments that he had recently conducted unbeknownst to the general public.

OKCupid has spent years advertising its expert accumulation and analysis of data, so the mere hint of such experiments sent shivers up my spine, and not just because I'm a tin-foil-wearing paranoia sufferer. I had a stake in this one. I used OKCupid over the years, and I immediately imagined a dating site puppeteer having some sick role in a part of my life.

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