An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Sprint has been caught taking millions of dollars in government subsidies for "serving" 885,000 low-income Americans who weren't using Sprint service, the Federal Communications Commission said today. Sprint violated the Lifeline program's "non-usage rule" that requires providers of free, subsidized plans to de-enroll subscribers who haven't used their phones recently, the FCC said. "It's outrageous that a company would claim millions of taxpayer dollars for doing nothing. This shows a careless disregard for program rules and American taxpayers," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said. "I have asked our Enforcement Bureau to investigate this matter to determine the full extent of the problem and to propose an appropriate remedy."

Sprint has admitted the mistake and said it will pay the money back. Like the FCC's other universal service programs, Lifeline is paid for by Americans through fees imposed on phone bills. The FCC said Sprint's violation "initially came to light as a result of an investigation by the Oregon Public Utility Commission." Because of that investigation, the FCC said it "has learned that Sprint Corp. claimed monthly subsidies for serving approximately 885,000 Lifeline subscribers, even though those subscribers were not using the service." The 885,000 subscribers that Sprint wasn't actually serving "represent nearly 30% of Sprint's Lifeline subscriber base and nearly 10% of the entire Lifeline program's subscriber base," the FCC said. The FCC didn't say exactly how much money Sprint received through its violation of the non-usage rule, but one month's worth of $9.25 payments for 885,000 subscribers would amount to $8.2 million.

A team of battery researchers from Halifax, Nova Scotia's Dalhousie University believes it has come up with a recipe that can make electric car batteries last for a million miles. Gizmodo reports: In a paper published in the The Journal of the Electrochemical Society earlier this month, battery researchers describe a new lithium-ion battery that could potentially power an electric vehicle for over one million miles and over 4,000 charging cycles while only losing about 10 percent of its charging capacity (and vehicle range) as it reaches the end of its lifespan. Most drivers upgrade their rides well before the odometer rolls over to one million, but the new battery tech could be especially useful in vehicles that are on the road around the clock like taxis, shuttles, and even delivery trucks.

Since 2016, the Dalhousie team has actually been conducting its research on improving lithium-ion batteries exclusively for Tesla, but this paper divulges exactly how they came up with a recipe for a million-mile electric car battery by optimizing all of the ingredients, which includes artificial graphite, and then improving the nanostructure of the lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide to create a crystal structure that's less likely to crack and degrade performance. According to Wired, who spoke to former researchers who worked in the Dalhousie lab, by publishing the most important details of this research, it provides a new performance benchmark for all of the other R&D labs working on improving battery tech, so, ideally, a million miles of battery life is just the beginning. Wired points out that just days after this paper was published, Tesla was awarded a patent for a new electric vehicle battery featuring nearly the exact same chemical makeup as the ones detailed in the research paper.

An anonymous reader shares a report: First, we learned "Friends" would leave Netflix for the upcoming streaming service, HBO Max. Now, "The Office" and "Parks and Recreation" are on their way out, as NBCUniversal prepares to launch its new streamer, Peacock. With legacy media brands like Disney, WarnerMedia, and NBCUniversal launching streaming services of their own, Netflix and Hulu subscribers face losing access to the shows they've grown accustomed to binge-watching to their heart's content. But there's an industry that is embracing that uncertainty: stores that sell DVDs and Blu-rays.

Blake Lindberg, a manager at Academy Records -- one of the few shops in New York City that still buys and sells second-hand DVDs -- told Business Insider that even though streaming services continue to bring in significantly more money than DVD sales, some of his patrons are frustrated with the increasingly fleeting nature of content on streaming services. "What we notice from talking to clientele is that these items might be on Netflix or Hulu this month, but they might not be next month," said Lindberg, who's worked at Academy Records for over 20 years. Academy Records mostly carries uncommon films and niche finds for dedicated collectors, Lindberg said, but the store keeps box sets of classic TV shows and new releases that might not be streaming yet available as well.

In a direct and urgent call to address gun violence in America, the chief executives of some of the nation's best-known companies sent a letter to Senate leaders on Thursday, urging an expansion of background checks to all firearms sales and stronger "red flag" laws. From a report: "Doing nothing about America's gun violence crisis is simply unacceptable and it is time to stand with the American public on gun safety," the heads of 145 companies, including Levi Strauss, Twitter and Uber, say in the letter [PDF], which was shared with The New York Times. The letter -- which urges the Republican-controlled Senate to enact bills already introduced in the Democrat-led House of Representatives -- is the most concerted effort by the business community to enter the gun debate, one of the most polarizing issues in the nation and one that was long considered off limits. The debate and the decision to sign -- or not sign -- are a case study in how chief executives must weigh their own views and the political risks to their businesses. Missing from the list, however, are some of America's biggest financial and technology companies, including Apple, Facebook, Google, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice-based technology in its U.S. drive-throughs. The fast-food chain hopes the AI technology will make the ordering process more efficient. McDonald's is implementing the technology with the help of start-up Apprente, which it acquired this week. The move comes amid concern about workers whose jobs may become obsolete as a result of automation and new technologies. McDonald's plans to expand its newly formed McD Tech team by hiring more engineers and data scientists. The report notes that the company recently "invested in technology that could automatically alter individual drive-through menu panels, depending on factors such as the weather, for example automatically suggesting McFlurry ice cream on hot days or telling customers which items were already proving popular at that particular restaurant that day."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast and several TV network owners have sued the state of Maine to stop a law that requires cable companies to offer a la carte access to TV channels. The complaint in U.S. District Court in Maine was filed Friday by Comcast, Comcast subsidiary NBCUniversal, A&E Television Networks, C-Span, CBS Corp., Discovery, Disney, Fox Cable Network Services, New England Sports Network, and Viacom. The companies claim the Maine law -- titled "An Act To Expand Options for Consumers of Cable Television in Purchasing Individual Channels and Programs" -- is preempted by the First Amendment and federal law. The Maine law is scheduled to take effect on September 19 and says that "a cable system operator shall offer subscribers the option of purchasing access to cable channels, or programs on cable channels, individually." The lawsuit seeks an injunction to prevent the law from being enforced. "I submitted this bill on behalf of Maine's hundreds of thousands of cable television subscribers," Representative Jeffrey Evangelos, an independent, said in testimony when the bill was being debated in March. "For far too long, consumers have been forced to purchase cable TV packages which include dozens of channels the consumer has no interest in watching."

But the current system involving service tiers and bundling "reflect[s] the exercise of First Amendment rights -- both by the programmers who decide how to license their programming to cable operators, and by the cable operators who decide how to provide that programming to the public," the industry lawsuit said. The lawsuit also says that "an array of federal statutory provisions precludes Maine from dictating how cable programming is presented to consumers." The state law "is expressly preempted by several provisions of the Communications Act," including a section that "prohibits state and local authorities from regulating the 'provision or content of cable services, except as expressly provided in' Title VI of the Communications Act," the lawsuit said.

In a paper published in Nature Medicine today, researchers led by ETH Zurich describe how they modified an off-the-shelf prosthetic leg with sensors and electrodes to give wearers a sense of knee movement and feedback from the sole of the foot on the ground. Engadget reports: The researchers worked with two patients with above-the-knee, or transfemoral, amputations. They used an Ossur prosthetic leg, which comes with a microprocessor and an angle sensor in the knee joint, IEEE Spectrum explains. The team then added an insole with seven sensors to the foot. Those sensors transmit signals in real-time, via Bluetooth to a controller strapped to the user's ankle. An algorithm in the controller encodes the feedback into neural signals and delivers that to a small implant in the patient's tibial nerve, at the back of the thigh. The brain can then interpret those signals as feedback from the knee and foot.

The modified prosthetic helped the users walk faster, feel more confident and consume less oxygen -- an indication that it was less strenuous than traditional prosthesis. The team also tested activating the tibial nerve implant to relieve phantom limb pain. Both patients saw a significant reduction in pain after a few minutes of electrical stimulation, but they had to be connected to a device in a lab to receive the treatment. With more testing, the researchers hope they might be able to bring these technologies to more amputees and make both available outside of the lab.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Alibaba founder Jack Ma discussed Mars and artificial intelligence in their first joint appearance on Thursday. From a report: The duo chatted for over half an hour about their vision of how technology, especially artificial intelligence, will shape the future. "I'm always amazed by your vision of technology, I'm not a tech guy," Ma said in his first remarks to Musk, before going on to talk about how artificial intelligence was not a threat. Ma described himself as "optimistic" about AI's impact on humanity, adding that people who worry too much about it have what he calls "college smartness." "People like us that are street smart, we're not scared of that." They also went on to talk about space travel, with Ma complimenting Musk on his attempts to journey into Mars via SpaceX while Musk noted China's advancements in that area, as well as how "inadequate" humans were against computers. Ma, known for arguing in favor of a 12-hour workday, also said he sees a future in which people will have to work only 12 hours a week. He said technological advancements would enable people to live longer and work far fewer hours. He added: "Every technology revolution, people start to worry. In the last 200 years, we have worried [that] new technology is going to take away all the jobs," he said. Ma has previously courted controversy with his endorsement of the "996" work practices prevalent in China's tech industry, under which employees are expected to work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.

An anonymous reader writes: For years, Microsoft used its patents as a way to profit from open-source products. The poster-child for Microsoft's intellectual property aggression were the File Allocation Table (FAT) patents. But the Microsoft of then is not the Microsoft of now. First, Microsoft open-sourced its entire patent portfolio and now Microsoft is explicitly making its last remaining FAT intellectual property, the exFAT patents, available to Linux and open source via the Open Invention Network (OIN). Microsoft announced that it now loves Linux and "we say that a lot, and we mean it! Today we're pleased to announce that Microsoft is supporting the addition of Microsoft's exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) technology to the Linux kernel." ExFAT is based on FAT, one of the first floppy disk file systems. Over time, FAT became Microsoft's files ystem of choice for MS-DOS and Windows. It would become the default file system for many applications. Microsoft extended FAT to flash memory storage devices such as USB drives and SD cards in 2006 with exFAT. While FAT isn't commonly used today, exFAT is used in hundreds of millions of storage device. Indeed, exFAT is the official file system for SD Card Association's standard large capacity SD cards.

Now, Microsoft states: "It's important to us that the Linux community can make use of exFAT included in the Linux kernel with confidence. To this end, we will be making Microsoft's technical specification for exFAT publicly available to facilitate the development of conformant, interoperable implementations. We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network's Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN's 3040+ members and licensees." Specifically, according to a Microsoft representative, "Microsoft is supporting the addition of the exFAT file system to the Linux kernel and the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network's Linux System Definition."