Richard Speed writes via The Register: It was 30 years ago when the first public release of the Java programming language introduced the world to Write Once, Run Anywhere -- and showed devs something cuddlier than C and C++. Originally called "Oak," Java was designed in the early 1990s by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. Initially aimed at digital devices, its focus soon shifted to another platform that was pretty new at the time -- the World Wide Web.

The language, which has some similarities to C and C++, usually compiles to a bytecode that can, in theory, run on any Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The intention was to allow programmers to Write Once Run Anywhere (WORA) although subtle differences in JVM implementations meant that dream didn't always play out in reality. This reporter once worked with a witty colleague who described the system as Write Once Test Everywhere, as yet another unexpected wrinkle in a JVM caused their application to behave unpredictably. However, the language soon became wildly popular, rapidly becoming the backbone of many enterprises. [...]

However, the platform's ubiquity has meant that alternatives exist to Oracle Java, and the language's popularity is undiminished by so-called "predatory licensing tactics." Over 30 years, Java has moved from an upstart new language to something enterprises have come to depend on. Yes, it may not have the shiny baubles demanded by the AI applications of today, but it continues to be the foundation for much of today's modern software development. A thriving ecosystem and a vast community of enthusiasts mean that Java remains more than relevant as it heads into its fourth decade.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: A computerized system that calls balls and strikes is being tested during Major League Baseball spring training exhibition games starting Thursday after four years of experiments in the minor leagues. Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred is an advocate of the Automated Ball-Strike System, which potentially as early as 2026 could be used to aid MLB home plate umpires, but not replace them...

Stadiums are outfitted with cameras that track each pitch and judge whether it crossed home plate within the strike zone. In early testing, umpires wore ear buds and would hear "ball" or "strike," then relay that to players and fans with traditional hand signals. The challenge system adds a wrinkle. During spring training, human umps will call every pitch, but each team will have the ability to challenge two calls per game, with no additions for extra innings. A team retains its challenge if successful, similar to the regulations for big league teams with video reviews, which were first used for home run calls in August 2008 and widely expanded to many calls for the 2014 season.

Only a batter, pitcher or catcher may challenge a call, signaling with the tap of a helmet or cap; and assistance from the dugout is not allowed. A challenge must be made within 2 seconds... MLB has installed the system in 13 spring training ballparks that are home to 19 teams.
After a full season of testing in the Triple-A minor league, roughly 51% of the challenges were successful. Interestingly, the system makes its call exactly halfway across home plate> , where human umpires consider the strike zone to cover the whole 17 inches from the front to the back of home plate.

Slashdot reader jenningsthecat writes: 3D printer manufacturer Bambu Labs has faced a storm of controversy and protest after releasing a security update which many users claim is the first step in moving towards an HP-style subscription model.
Bambu Labs responded that there's misinformation circulating online, adding "we acknowledge that our communication might have contributed to the confusion." Bambu Labs spokesperson Nadia Yaakoubi did "damage control", answering questions from the Verge: Q: Will Bambu publicly commit to never requiring a subscription in order to control its printers and print from them over a home network?

A: For our current product line, yes. We will never require a subscription to control or print from our printers over a home network...

Q: Will Bambu publicly commit to never putting any existing printer functionality behind a subscription?

Yes...
Bambu's site adds that the security update "is beta testing, not a forced update. The choice is yours. You can participate in the beta program to help us refine these features, or continue using your current firmware."

Hackaday notes another wrinkle: This follows the original announcement which had the 3D printer community up in arms, and quickly saw the new tool that's supposed to provide safe and secure communications with Bambu Lab printers ripped apart to extract the security certificate and private key... As the flaming wreck that's Bambu Lab's PR efforts keeps hurtling down the highway of public opinion, we'd be remiss to not point out that with the security certificate and private key being easily obtainable from the Bambu Connect Electron app, there is absolutely no point to any of what Bambu Lab is doing.
The Verge asked Bambu Labs about that too: Q: Does the private key leaking change any of your plans?

No, this doesn't change our plans, and we've taken immediate action.
Bambu Labs had said their security update would "ensure only authorized access and operations are permitted," remembers Ars Technica. "This would, Bambu suggested, mitigate risks of 'remote hacks or printer exposure issues' and lower the risk of 'abnormal traffic or attacks.'" This was necessary, Bambu wrote, because of increases in requests made to its cloud services "through unofficial channels," targeted DDOS attacks, and "peaks of up to 30 million unauthorized requests per day" (link added by Bambu).
But Ars Technica also found some skepticism online: Repair advocate Louis Rossmann, noting Bambu's altered original blog post, uploaded a video soon after, "Bambu's Gaslighting Masterclass: Denying their own documented restrictions"... suggesting that the company was asking buyers to trust that Bambu wouldn't enact restrictive policies it otherwise wrote into its user agreements.
And Ars Technica also cites another skeptical response from a video posted by open source hardware hacker and YouTube creator Jeff Geerling: "Every IoT device has these problems, and there are better ways to secure things than by locking out access, or making it harder to access, or requiring their cloud to be integrated."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to consider two bills Thursday that would effectively nullify the Supreme Court's rulings against patents on broad software processes and human genes. Open source and Internet freedom advocates are mobilizing and pushing back. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (or PERA, S. 2140), sponsored by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-Del.), would amend US Code such that "all judicial exceptions to patent eligibility are eliminated." That would include the 2014 ruling in which the Supreme Court held, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing, that simply performing an existing process on a computer does not make it a new, patentable invention. "The relevant question is whether the claims here do more than simply instruct the practitioner to implement the abstract idea of intermediated settlement on a generic computer," Thomas wrote. "They do not." That case also drew on Bilski v. Kappos, a case in which a patent was proposed based solely on the concept of hedging against price fluctuations in commodity markets. [...]

Another wrinkle in the PERA bill involves genetic patents. The Supreme Court ruled in June 2013 that pieces of DNA that occur naturally in the genomes of humans or other organisms cannot, themselves, be patented. Myriad Genetics had previously been granted patents on genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer, BRCA1 and BRCA2, which were targeted in a lawsuit led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The resulting Supreme Court decision -- this one also written by Thomas -- found that information that naturally occurs in the human genome could not be the subject to a patent, even if the patent covered the process of isolating that information from the rest of the genome. As with broad software patents, PERA would seemingly allow for the patenting of isolated human genes and connections between those genes and diseases like cancer. [...] The Judiciary Committee is set to debate and potentially amend or rewrite PREVAIL and PERA (i.e. mark up) on Thursday.

If 2023 was the tech industry's year of the A.I. chatbot, 2024 is turning out to be the year of A.I. plumbing. From a report: It may not sound as exciting, but tens of billions of dollars are quickly being spent on behind-the-scenes technology for the industry's A.I. boom. Companies from Amazon to Meta are revamping their data centers to support artificial intelligence. They are investing in huge new facilities, while even places like Saudi Arabia are racing to build supercomputers to handle A.I. Nearly everyone with a foot in tech or giant piles of money, it seems, is jumping into a spending frenzy that some believe could last for years.

Microsoft, Meta, and Google's parent company, Alphabet, disclosed this week that they had spent more than $32 billion combined on data centers and other capital expenses in just the first three months of the year. The companies all said in calls with investors that they had no plans to slow down their A.I. spending. In the clearest sign of how A.I. has become a story about building a massive technology infrastructure, Meta said on Wednesday that it needed to spend billions more on the chips and data centers for A.I. than it had previously signaled. "I think it makes sense to go for it, and we're going to," Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, said in a call with investors.

The eye-popping spending reflects an old parable in Silicon Valley: The people who made the biggest fortunes in California's gold rush weren't the miners -- they were the people selling the shovels. No doubt Nvidia, whose chip sales have more than tripled over the last year, is the most obvious A.I. winner. The money being thrown at technology to support artificial intelligence is also a reminder of spending patterns of the dot-com boom of the 1990s. For all of the excitement around web browsers and newfangled e-commerce websites, the companies making the real money were software giants like Microsoft and Oracle, the chipmaker Intel, and Cisco Systems, which made the gear that connected those new computer networks together. But cloud computing has added a new wrinkle: Since most start-ups and even big companies from other industries contract with cloud computing providers to host their networks, the tech industry's biggest companies are spending big now in hopes of luring customers.

Many investors are lining up to bet on the collapse of former President Donald J. Trump's social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which made its stock market debut last week under the ticker "DJT." The stock has been called the "mother of all meme stocks" since it is highly volatile and there are no fundamental underpinnings. It's being valued at roughly 1,600 times its annual revenue, at Wednesday's closing price. "By comparison, the stock of Facebook's owner trades at about eight times revenues, and Google's owner trades at six times," notes Fast Company. The New York Times reports: Trump Media is the most "shorted" special purpose acquisition vehicle in the country, according to the financial data company S3 Partners. Short-sellers bet that the price of a stock will fall. They do that by borrowing shares of a company and selling them into the market, hoping to buy them back later at a lower price, before returning the shares to the lender and pocketing the difference as profit. The demand to short Trump Media, the parent company of the social media platform Truth Social, is so great that stock lenders can charge enormous fees, making it hard for short-sellers to turn a profit unless the shares fall significantly. Still, there is a lot of interest in taking the bet. "They are looking for this stock to crater and crater very quickly," said Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics at S3. Last month, traders lost $126 million betting against Trump Media, according to S3.

On Monday, Trump Media published updated financial information, revealing little revenue, large losses and a statement from the company's independent auditor expressing "substantial doubt" about its financial viability. This appeared to galvanize investors betting against the company, as the stock slipped from its highs. But short-sellers are finding it difficult and costly to trade in Trump Media. There are roughly 137 million shares in the company, and only around five million of those are available to short-sellers. Mr. Trump owns about 60 percent of shares, and company executives also hold a chunk of the stock. Company insiders tend not to lend their shares to short-sellers. Big asset managers like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which regularly lend out shares, are not major holders of Trump Media, further crimping the supply.

According to S3, 4.9 million of the roughly five million available shares are already on loan. As with any loan, when share owners lend their stock to a short-seller, they charge a fee, usually expressed as an annual interest rate on the stock's current value. Typically, the fee for borrowing stock is a fraction of a percentage point. For Trump Media, it has risen to 550 percent, Mr. Dusaniwsky said. Trump Media's stock currently trades at around $50. That means that shorting it for a month would cost more than $20 per share. For a short-seller to break even, the stock price would have to fall by almost half by early May.

There is another wrinkle, too. One large broker said much of the short trading was not an outright bet against Trump Media. Since the advent of meme-stock trading and the vilification of short-sellers that win only if popular companies lose, large investors are wary of making such trades. Instead, the current trade driving demand is designed to capture the difference between DJT's stock price and outstanding "warrants," which will give the owners the right to new stock at a fixed price as long as regulators approve the new shares. Partly because of that uncertainty, those warrants currently trade below $19, with a list of hedge funds as recent holders. Even after the high cost to borrow stock is accounted for, they are still able to profit from the $30 difference between existing stock and what the warrants are worth, assuming the warrants become registered as shares.

Andrew Joseph, writing for STAT News: There was something odd about these Alzheimer's cases. Part of it was the patients' presentations: Some didn't have the classic symptoms of the condition. But it was also that the patients were in their 40s and 50s, even their 30s, far younger than people who normally develop the disease. They didn't even have the known genetic mutations that can set people on the course for such early-onset Alzheimer's. But this small handful of patients did share a particular history. As children, they had received growth hormone taken from the brains of human cadavers, which used to be a treatment for a number of conditions that caused short stature.

Now, decades later, they were showing signs of Alzheimer's. In the interim, scientists had discovered that that type of hormone treatment they got could unwittingly transfer bits of protein into recipients' brains. In some cases, it had induced a fatal brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD -- a finding that led to the banning of the procedure 40 years ago. It seemed that it wasn't just the proteins behind CJD that could get transferred. As the scientific team treating the patients reported Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, the hormone transplant seeded the beta-amyloid protein that's a hallmark of Alzheimer's in some recipients' brains, which, decades later, propagated into disease-causing plaques. They are the first known cases of transmitted Alzheimer's disease, likely a scientific anomaly yet a finding that adds another wrinkle to ongoing arguments about what truly causes Alzheimer's. "It looks real that some of these people developed early-onset Alzheimer's because of that [hormone treatment]," said Ben Wolozin, an expert on neurodegenerative diseases at Boston University's medical school, who was not involved in the study.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: In an unmarked laboratory stationed between the campuses of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a splinter group of scientists is hunting for the next billion-dollar drug. The group, bankrolled with $500 million from some of the wealthiest families in American business, has created a stir in the world of academia by dangling seven-figure paydays to lure highly credentialed university professors to a for-profit bounty hunt. Its self-described goal: to avoid the blockages and paperwork that slow down the traditional paths of scientific research at universities and pharmaceutical companies, and discover scores of new drugs (at first, for cancer and brain disease) that can be produced and sold quickly.

Braggadocio from start-ups is de rigueur, and plenty of ex-academics have started biotechnology companies, hoping to strike it rich on their one big discovery. This group, rather boastfully named Arena BioWorks, borrowing from a Teddy Roosevelt quote, doesn't have one singular idea, but it does have a big checkbook. "I'm not apologetic about being a capitalist, and that motivation from a team is not a bad thing," said the technology magnate Michael Dell, one of the group's big-money backers. Others include an heiress to the Subway sandwich fortune and an owner of the Boston Celtics. The wrinkle is that for decades, many drug discoveries have not just originated at colleges and universities, but also produced profits that helped fill their endowment coffers. The University of Pennsylvania, for one, has said it earned hundreds of millions of dollars for research into mRNA vaccines used against Covid-19. Under this model, any such windfall would remain private. [...]

The five billionaires backing Arena include Michael Chambers, a manufacturing titan and the wealthiest man in North Dakota, and Elisabeth DeLuca, the widow of a founder of the Subway chain. They have each put in $100 million and expect to double or triple their investment in later rounds. In confidential materials provided to investors and others, Arena describes itself as "a privately funded, fully independent, public good." Arena's backers said in interviews that they did not intend to entirely cut off their giving to universities. Duke turned down an offer from Mr. Pagliuca, an alumnus and board member, to set up part of the lab there. Mr. Dell, a major donor to the University of Texas hospital system in his hometown, Austin, leased space for a second Arena laboratory there. [Stuart Schreiber, a longtime Harvard-affiliated researcher who quit to be Arenaâ(TM)s lead scientist] said it would require years -- and billions of dollars in additional funding -- before the team would learn whether its model led to the production of any worthy drugs. "Is it going to be better or worse?" Dr. Schreiber said. "I don't know, but it's worth a shot."

A Texas A&M professor failed more than half of his class after ChatGPT falsely claimed the students used the software to write their final assignments. Rolling Stone reports: A number of seniors at Texas A&M University-Commerce who already walked the stage at graduation this year have been temporarily denied their diplomas after a professor ineptly used AI software to assess their final assignments, the partner of a student in his class -- known as DearKick on Reddit -- claims to Rolling Stone. Dr. Jared Mumm, a campus rodeo instructor who also teaches agricultural classes, sent an email on Monday to a group of students informing them that he had submitted grades for their last three essay assignments of the semester. Everyone would be receiving an 'X' in the course, Mumm explained, because he had used "Chat GTP" (the OpenAI chatbot is actually called "ChatGPT") to test whether they'd used the software to write the papers -- and the bot claimed to have authored every single one. "I copy and paste your responses in [ChatGPT] and [it] will tell me if the program generated the content," he wrote, saying he had tested each paper twice. He offered the class a makeup assignment to avoid the failing grade -- which could otherwise, in theory, threaten their graduation status.

There's just one problem: ChatGPT doesn't work that way. The bot isn't made to detect material composed by AI -- or even material produced by itself -- and is known to sometimes emit damaging misinformation. With very little prodding, ChatGPT will even claim to have written passages from famous novels such as Crime and Punishment. Educators can choose among a wide variety of effective AI and plagiarism detection tools to assess whether students have completed assignments themselves, including Winston AI and Content at Scale; ChatGPT is not among them. And OpenAI's own tool for determining whether a text was written by a bot has been judged "not very accurate" by a digital marketing agency that recommends tech resources to businesses.

In an amusing wrinkle, Mumm's claims appear to be undercut by a simple experiment using ChatGPT. On Tuesday, redditor Delicious_Village112 found an abstract of Mumm's doctoral dissertation on pig farming and submitted a section of that paper to the bot, asking if it might have written the paragraph. "Yes, the passage you shared could indeed have been generated by a language model like ChatGPT, given the right prompt," the program answered. "The text contains several characteristics that are consistent with AI-generated content." At the request of other redditors, Delicious_Village112 also submitted Mumm's email to students about their presumed AI deception, asking the same question. "Yes, I wrote the content you've shared," ChatGPT replied. Yet the bot also clarified: "If someone used my abilities to help draft an email, I wouldn't have a record of it." "A&M-Commerce confirms that no students failed the class or were barred from graduating because of this issue," the school said in a statement. "Dr. Jared Mumm, the class professor, is working individually with students regarding their last written assignments. Some students received a temporary grade of 'X' -- which indicates 'incomplete' -- to allow the professor and students time to determine whether AI was used to write their assignments and, if so, at what level." The university also confirmed that several students had been cleared of any academic dishonesty.

"University officials are investigating the incident and developing policies to address the use or misuse of AI technology in the classroom," the statement continued. "They are also working to adopt AI detection tools and other resources to manage the intersection of AI technology and higher education. The use of AI in coursework is a rapidly changing issue that confronts all learning institutions."

"ThreatGPT, MedicalGPT, DateGPT and DirtyGPT are a mere sampling of the many outfits to apply for trademarks with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in recent months," notes TechCrunch, exploring the issue of whether OpenAI can actually trademark the phrase 'GPT'... Little wonder that after applying in late December for a trademark for "GPT," which stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer," OpenAI last month petitioned the USPTO to speed up the process, citing the "myriad infringements and counterfeit apps" beginning to spring into existence. Unfortunately for OpenAI, its petition was dismissed last week... Given the rest of the queue in which OpenAI finds itself, that means a decision could take up to five more months, says Jefferson Scher, a partner in the intellectual property group of Carr & Ferrell and chair of the firm's trademark practice group. Even then, the outcome isn't assured, Scher explains... [H]elpful, says Scher, is the fact that OpenAI has been using "GPT" for years, having released its original Generative Pre-trained Transformer model, or GPT-1, back in October 2018...

Even if a USPTO examiner has no problem with OpenAI's application, it will be moved afterward to a so-called opposition period, where other market participants can argue why the agency should deny the "GPT" trademark. Scher describes what would follow this way: In the case of OpenAI, an opposer would challenge Open AI's position that "GPT" is proprietary and that the public perceives it as such instead of perceiving the acronym to pertain to generative AI more broadly...

It all begs the question of why the company didn't move to protect "GPT" sooner. Here, Scher speculates that the company was "probably caught off guard" by its own success... Another wrinkle here is that OpenAI may soon be so famous that its renown becomes a dominant factor, says Scher. While one doesn't need to be famous to secure a trademark, once an outfit is widely enough recognized, it receives protection that extends far beyond its sphere. Rolex is too famous a trademark to be used on anything else, for instance.
Thanks to Slashdot reader rolodexter for sharing the article.

In response to pesticides, many cockroach females have lost their taste for sweet stuff, which changes how they make the next generation of insects. From a report: When a male cockroach wants to mate with a female cockroach very much, he will scoot his butt toward her, open his wings and offer her a homemade meal -- sugars and fats squished out of his tergal gland. As the lovely lady nibbles, the male locks onto her with one penis while another penis delivers a sperm package. If everything goes smoothly, a roach's romp can last around 90 minutes. But increasingly, cockroach coitus is going really, weirdly wrong, and is contributing to roach populations in some places that are more difficult to vanquish with conventional pesticides. Back in 1993, scientists working at North Carolina State University discovered a trait in the German cockroach, a species that inhabits every continent except Antarctica. Specifically, these new cockroaches seemed to have no affection for a form of sugar called glucose, which was strange because -- as anyone who has ever battled against a cockroach infestation knows -- cockroaches normally cannot get enough of the sweet stuff.

So, where did these new, health-conscious cockroaches come from? It seems we created them by accident, after decades of trying to kill their ancestors with sweet powders and liquids laced with poison. The cockroaches that craved sweets ate the poison and died, while cockroaches less keen on glucose avoided the death traps and survived long enough to breed, thus passing that trait down to the next cockroach generation. "When we think of evolution, we usually imagine wild animals, but actually, it's also happening with small animals living in our kitchens," said Ayako Wada-Katsumata, an entomologist at North Carolina State University. Dr. Wada-Katsumata and her colleagues have just introduced yet another wrinkle to the cockroach's story: According to a study published this month in the journal Communications Biology, the same trait that might help a female cockroach avoid sweet-tasting poison baits also makes her less likely to stick around and mate with normal cockroach males.

This is because cockroach saliva is capable of rapidly breaking down complex sugars, like those found in the male's courtship offering, and turning them into simple sugars, such as glucose. So when one of these glucose-averse females takes a bite of the male's nuptial gift, it literally turns bitter in her mouth, and she bolts before he can complete the double barrel lock-and-pop maneuver. "Great!" you may be thinking. "The fewer cockroach hookups, the fewer infestations we'll have." Not so fast, said the researchers. "As to how this will affect the population, it's really complicated," said Dr. Wada-Katsumata. That's because, despite the hang-ups, glucose-averse cockroaches still find ways to do the deed.

Amazon is opening its first physical clothing store on Wednesday, the latest brick-and-mortar initiative from the world's largest online retailer. From a report: Called Amazon Style, the shop is located in Glendale, California, near Los Angeles. The Seattle-based company has pledged to open stores only when it has something original to offer customers. In Style's case, the new wrinkle is an app that lets shoppers scan codes on displayed items, which employees fetch in the right size or color and then send to a fitting room or checkout counter. Amazon has built a giant e-commerce business selling basic clothing items like packs of t-shirts. But it has had less success courting fashion brands, which have long balked at counterfeits on Amazon's third-party marketplace.

A group of TikTok- and Instagram-famous physicians say they have a solution for the "red tape" of the current medical system: NFTs of cartoon doctors. From a report: These NFTs, called MetaDocs, are supposed to give buyers access to real doctors, almost like a Web3 telehealth subscription. When MetaDocs launched in December, it claimed that its legion of celebrity doctors, who have a collective social media following of 70 million and have included "Dr. Pimple Popper" Sandra Lee and plastic surgeon Dr. Richard Brown of TikTok fame, would all be available via DM, group "ask me anything" sessions, or one-on-one video chats to those who buy in. MetaDocs founder Dr. Sina Joorabchi hopes it will evolve into a full-fledged virtual clinic in the so-called metaverse, where patients can put on a haptic suit and be examined remotely by a physician in virtual reality.

But now, MetaDocs is facing backlash from the medical community, in part because it is not actually licensed as a telemedicine service and thus its doctors cannot legally make diagnoses, write prescriptions, or give personalized medical advice to anyone who buys a MetaDocs NFT. A further wrinkle: Doctors are almost always required to be licensed in a state in order to practice there, including through telehealth services. "At this point, we're hesitant to refer to anybody as a patient," Dr. Dustin Portela, a MetaDocs physician and practicing dermatologist, told BuzzFeed News. According to a recent white paper, the presale cost of a MetaDocs NFT will be 0.2 ETH, or about $570, though the company hasn't determined an exact price yet. But why would someone pay hundreds of dollars for a cartoon so they could "ask a doctor anything" if they are not seeking some form of medical advice?

Jonathan Greenberg: Surprising almost no one, the US Federal Trade Commission has moved to block Nvidia's acquisition of Arm. We have written a lot about this deal and Arm in general, and wanted to touch on the topic in light of this news. We will save the background on this deal for that prior piece, but a few things stand out. Arm is seen by regulators as being too important to not be neutral. No other chip company can buy the company, as no one wants to compete with this key supplier of semiconductor intellectual property (IP), and almost every major chip company is now an Arm licensee, one way or another. So what will happen to the company now?

We have to first look at Arm's current owners, Softbank -- the Japanese investment firm. Their original impetus for selling Arm dates back a few years when they were under pressure from some expensive, high-profile deal failures, WeWork being the best known example among several others. At the time, Softbank needed to raise cash or at least convince their own investors that they had the ability to do so. Fast forward to today, and Softbank is in a much better position. They seem to have benefited strongly from the technology stock market bull run over the last two years. They made some big bets on the market and these have paid off, so the company is now in a much better financial position. So one option is for Sotbank to do nothing. Arguably, Arm needs to make some big investments to fund future R&D needs, but from the outside it certainly seems like Arm could raise sufficient funds on its own to do this.

Nonetheless, we have to think that Softbank would still like to exit. They almost made a pile of cash and having it snatched away is the kind of factor that spurs the brain to think of alternatives. The most likely outcome is an IPO of at least a minority stake of Arm. Prior to the Nvidia deal, Softbank seems to have gone far down this path. However, Softbank faced the problem that the public markets would have likely valued Arm less than what Softbank hoped (or possibly even what they paid for it) and far less than what Nvidia offered. The capital markets are in a different place today, and Arm is likely to attract a much higher valuation because semis are hot now in a way they have not been for a long time. One wrinkle for this plan is that an IPO will take some time to arrange. We would guess at least six months, possibly longer. No idea what the markets will look like then, and it leaves Arm in limbo when they should be doing all that R&D investment.

A contract with a tech giant can put a startup on the map with venture capitalists and the market at large. That's what happened for Netskope, a cloud-based data security provider. Founded in 2012, the company was able to quickly scale up and secure multiple rounds of funding -- in part because it had a top-tier customer right out of the gate: Netflix. From a report: There was just one catch to landing that deal: It had to hire the streaming company's vice president of IT operations, Michael Kail, as a consultant and an advisor, and pay him with fees and stock options. Netskope (not to be confused with the now-defunct Netscape) wasn't the only startup confronted with that proposition. At least nine firms that worked for Netflix entered into similar arrangements, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Other companies drawn into Kail's web included software, cloud-storage and analytics companies Docurated, Numerify, NetEnrich, Platfora, VistaraIT, ElasticBox, Maginatics and Sumo Logic. The shady-sounding plot was described by the government during a criminal trial earlier this year in San Jose federal court. Kail was found guilty of more than two dozen fraud and money laundering counts. At his sentencing Oct. 19, prosecutors will ask that he get a stiff punishment of seven years in prison as well as be ordered to pay fines, restitution, and forfeit a $3.3 million home in Los Gatos, California.

The former Netflix VP, who also briefly served as chief information officer at Yahoo, "leveraged his status as a leader of the IT community in Silicon Valley to subvert the trust of Netflix and others to profit at their expense," prosecutors said in a recent court filing. They added that the similar schemes are "almost certainly" common among high-level tech executives, but that in no way excuses the behavior. The startups that paid to play, and possibly many others, believed this was how Netflix did business." A disturbing element of this narrative is the unequal playing field startups are on when they negotiate with big companies. As the government suggested, the crimes also seem relatively easy for an influential executive to carry out -- especially since the founders of fledgling firms have little if any incentive to blow the whistle, and may feel they have no choice but to go along with a pay-to-play scheme. In his own memorandum to the court, requesting that he be sentenced to a year of house arrest, Kail, 49, described himself as a "global power leader, top dev ops influencer and a thought leader." He appeared to minimize the impact of the crimes, describing them as "regrettable flaws in communication and transparency," and asserting that his undisclosed business relationships were more helpful than harmful to all involved. Yet many startup founders already have ample complaints about overly-generous advisor compensation and messy cap tables, even without the added corporate bribery wrinkle.

In regard to the new Google Pay app, "Google is killing one perfectly fine service and replacing it with a worse, less functional service," writes Ars Technica's Ron Amadeo. "The fun, confusing wrinkle here is that the new and old services are both called 'Google Pay.'" From the report: The old Google Pay service that has been around for years is dying. The app will be shut down in the US on April 5, and if you want to continue using New Google Pay, you'll have to go find and download a totally new app. NFC tap-and-pay functionality won't really change once you set up the new app, but the New Google Pay app won't use your Google account for P2P payments anymore. You'll be required to make a new account. You won't be able to send any money to your new contacts until they download the new app and make a new account, too. On top of all that, the Google Pay website will be stripped of all payment functionality in the US on April 5, and New Google Pay won't support doing anything from the web. You won't be able to transfer money, view payment activity, or see your balance from a browser.

In addition to less convenient access and forcing users to remake their accounts, New Google Pay is also enticing users to switch with new fees for transfers to debit cards. Old Google Pay did this for free, but New Google Pay now has "a fee of 1.5% or $.31 (whichever is higher), when you transfer out money with a debit card."

Google is currently sending out emails to existing users detailing all this. There's also a support page link and a notice at the top of pay.google.com. On the Play Store, Google has already started hiding the old Google Pay app from search results, renamed it "Google Pay (old app)," and updated the app home screen with a message to sign up for the new app.

"The new Google Pay app came out of beta this week, and it marks the first step in a major upheaval in the Google Pay service," writes Ars Technica, complaining "Google is killing one perfectly fine service and replacing it with a worse, less functional service." The fun, confusing wrinkle here is that the new and old services are both called "Google Pay...." The old Google Pay service that has been around for years is dying. The app will be shut down in the U.S. on April 5...

- If you want to continue using New Google Pay, you'll have to go find and download a totally new app.

- NFC tap-and-pay functionality won't really change once you set up the new app, but the New Google Pay app won't use your Google account for P2P payments anymore. You'll be required to make a new account.

- You won't be able to send any money to your new contacts until they download the new app and make a new account, too.

- On top of all that, the Google Pay website will be stripped of all payment functionality in the U.S. on April 5, and New Google Pay won't support doing anything from the web. You won't be able to transfer money, view payment activity, or see your balance from a browser.

- In addition to less convenient access and forcing users to remake their accounts, New Google Pay is also enticing users to switch with new fees for transfers to debit cards. Old Google Pay did this for free, but New Google Pay now has "a fee of 1.5% or $.31 (whichever is higher), when you transfer out money with a debit card..."

The worst part of it all is that, like the move from Google Music to YouTube Music, there is no reward at the end of this transition.
Besides sending out an email, Google also created a support page and a notice at the top of pay.google.com, Ars Technica reports.

But they call it "yet anothre annoying transition... an occurrence that's getting more frequent and more annoying in recent years, thanks to similar Google shutdowns of Google Play Music, Cloud Print, Inbox, Works with Nest, the ongoing Hangouts situation, and many others."

Car and Driver magazine explores what gives Tesla's vehicles their comparatively long range. And apparently one factor is just "big batteries. This may be obvious, but a battery that holds more energy should translate to more range, and Tesla has the largest battery packs out there... What isn't always obvious is how much of a battery pack's energy is usable versus its maximum theoretical or gross capacity... Based on the limited data we have, it seems that Tesla allows its cars to use more of a pack's capacity than other manufacturers do. We suspect that's partially because the company puts some of the responsibility on the driver to choose how high to charge the battery, noting that anything above a 90 percent charge should be reserved only for trips, not everyday use.

Tesla's largest battery pack carries the energy equivalent of just 2.9 gallons of gas when fully charged. The key to extending EPA range is to use less electricity to propel the vehicle and to recapture as much energy as possible using the electric motors to slow the vehicle whenever the driver lifts off the accelerator during the EPA cycles' many slowdowns. Tesla's aggressive regenerative braking alone nets it a 13 percent gain in range versus the Porsche Taycan, which waits until the driver presses the brake pedal before initiating meaningful regen. This is one piece of Tesla's holistic approach to efficiency that also includes its vehicles' ability to roll down the road with less friction than their competitors.
Tesla also obtained more efficiency through the engineering of its all-wheel-drive. But there's also another interesting wrinkle: [T]he EPA allows automakers the option to run three additional drive cycles and use those results to earn a more favorable adjustment factor. Currently, only Tesla and Audi employ this strategy for their EVs, and Tesla scores the most advantageous results, with adjustments that range from 29.5 percent on the Model 3 Standard Range Plus to 24.4 percent on the Model Y Performance. If Tesla had used the standard adjustment factor of 30 percent, the Model Y Performance's window-sticker range would drop to 292 miles. But because Tesla takes advantage of the EPA's alternate methodology, the company can instead claim a 315-mile range. This is all within the regulatory rules. Among EV makers, Tesla has been at this game longer than most, so it's not surprising that it has figured out the tricks to maximizing its EPA numbers.
And the magazine shares this tip for prospective Tesla customers. "Based on the road-load data it has submitted to the EPA, opting for 21-inch wheels on a Model S Long Range Plus will cut the range by nearly 80 miles.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The smell of summer in Los Angeles, or any major city, is often tinged with asphalt. A freshly paved road or a new tar roof doesn't just wrinkle your nose, however: A new study suggests fresh asphalt is a significant, yet overlooked, source of air pollution. In fact, the material's contribution to one kind of particulate air pollution could rival or even exceed that of cars and trucks. "It's a super cool paper," says Allen Robinson, an environmental engineer at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved with the research. "Asphalt could be a big, important contributor" to air pollution, he says. Air quality has improved over the past several decades in California and many other parts of the United States, largely because of cleaner exhaust from vehicles and power plants. Despite that, air pollution still contributes to many health problems -- ranging from asthma to heart attacks. And many sources of air pollution continue to be a problem, from livestock emissions to volatile organic compounds from paints, cleaning products, and personal care products (especially those that contain fragrances, such as shampoo).

Yet, when scientists looked at all the known sources of air pollution in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas, they didn't add up. Some sources had not yet been identified. "Asphalt was something that jumped out to us," says Drew Gentner, an environmental engineer at Yale University who led the new study. The material, made from crude oil or similar substances, contains the kinds of semivolatile organic compounds that lead to some types of air pollution. There's also a lot of it. Gentner and colleagues gathered two types of fresh road asphalt and heated them in a laboratory furnace. They also tested new asphalt shingles and liquid asphalts used for roofing. They reasoned that new material should release more chemicals than older material, and they wanted to see how the emission rate changes as the fresh asphalt ages.

President Trump voiced support on Tuesday for Oracle to buy the U.S. operations of TikTok, adding a fresh wrinkle to the bidding for the Chinese-owned video-sharing app. From a report: Oracle is a new entrant in the negotiations for TikTok, whose owner ByteDance is facing a fall deadline from the Trump administration to divest itself of its U.S. operations. Oracle, a giant in business software, has had preliminary discussions about teaming with some of ByteDance's existing minority investors to buy TikTok's U.S. operations but it isn't clear how advanced the talks are, said people familiar with the matter. Microsoft said earlier this month it was in negotiations with ByteDance, and that it was coordinating with the White House. Twitter is also exploring a bid, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

Oracle has closer ties to the White House than most other parties involved in the bidding. Larry Ellison, the company's co-founder, chairman and largest shareholder, earlier this year threw a fundraiser at his house for the president. Chief Executive Safra Catz also worked on the executive committee for the Trump transition team in 2016. Asked Tuesday if Oracle would be a good buyer for TikTok, President Trump said, "Well I think Oracle is a great company and I think its owner is a tremendous guy, a tremendous person. I think that Oracle would be certainly somebody that could handle it."