Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla's long-running fight to block public access to a stretch of Pacific Ocean beach adjacent to his property got new life thanks to an appeals court ruling that could make it harder for surfers and sun seekers to get to the crescent-shaped cove an hour south of San Francisco. From a report: The beach had been open to the public for decades before Khosla bought the 89-acre property in 2008 for $32.5 million and shut off the lone road leading there. Many thought Khosla had hit a dead end last year when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up his cause, but the ruling Monday breathed life into it, finding the prior owners' willingness to let beach goers use the road didn't amount to a "public dedication" because they collected fees for parking. That strengthens Khosla's position if and when he obtains a permit from the California Coastal Commission to restrict the hours when a gate at the top of the road is open. The Friends of Martin's Beach, which has been sparring with the billionaire for years, wanted the court to find there was a long-established precedent for keeping the road open. Instead, the three-judge panel upheld a trial judge's ruling in Khosla's favor, finding there was substantial evidence that the previous owners didn't intend to dedicate the road for public use because they charged fees.

New submitter AllHail writes: HPE SAS solid state drives are affected by a firmware problem which causes these drives to stop working after 32768 power-on hours (3 years and 9 months). If these drives are not flashed with updated firmware before the failure, the drives and the data on them become unrecoverable at that time. If several of these drives are installed and operated together in a RAID, they are going to fail almost simultaneously. Patch or assume the risk of failure, says Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Texas Instruments' $100 calculators have been required in classrooms for more than twenty years, as students and teachers still struggle to afford them. From a report: Texas Instruments released its first graphing calculator, the TI-81, to the public in 1990. Designed for use in pre-algebra and algebra courses, it was superseded by other Texas Instruments models with varying shades of complexity but these calculators remained virtually untouched aesthetically. Today, Texas Instruments still sells a dozen or so different calculator models intended for different kinds of students, ranging from the TI-73 and TI-73 Explorer for middle school classes to the TI-Nspire CX and TI-Nspire CX CAS ($149), an almost smartphone-like calculator with more processing power. But the most popular calculators, teachers tell me, include the TI-83 Plus ($94), launched in 1999; the TI-84 Plus ($118), launched in 2004; the very similar TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, also launched in 2004; and the TI-89 Titanium ($128).

Thompson (anecdote in the story), like many teachers, works in a district where it's a financial impossibility to ask students and their parents to shell out $100 for a new calculator. (Graphing calculators of any brand are recommended at Thompson's school, and they are essential for the curriculum.) So the onus falls on him and other teachers, who rely on their teacher salaries -- Thompson makes $62,000 a year -- to fill in the gaps. At first, Thompson bought cheaper calculators: four-function, $3 calculators. This, he quickly realized, would be insufficient. "A lot of students were angry and actually left the class and went to the classroom of the more experienced teacher next to me and asked to borrow her calculators," he told me. The bulky, rectangular Texas Instruments calculators act more like mini-handheld computers than basic calculators, plotting graphs and solving complex functions. Seeing expressions, formulas, and graphs on-screen is integral for students in geometry, calculus, physics, statistics, business, and finance classes. They provide students access to more advanced features, letting them do all the calculations of a scientific calculator, as well as graph equations and make function tables. Giving a child a four-function calculator -- allowing for only addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division -- would leave them woefully underprepared for the requirements of more advanced math and science classes. Further reading: This is the Story of the 1970s Great Calculator Race.

Throughout India, the number of days with very heavy rains has increased over the last century. At the same time, the dry spells between storms have gotten longer. Showers that reliably penetrate the soil are less common. For a country that relies on rain for the vast share of its water, that combination is potentially ruinous. The New York Times reports: The rains are more erratic today. There's no telling when they might start, nor how late they might stay. This year, India experienced its wettest September in a century; more than 1,600 people were killed by floods; and even by the time traditional harvest festivals rolled around in October, parts of the country remained inundated. Even more troubling, extreme rainfall is more common and more extreme. Over the last century, the number of days with very heavy rains has increased, with longer dry spells stretching out in between. Less common are the sure and steady rains that can reliably penetrate the soil. This is ruinous for a country that gets the vast share of its water from the clouds. The problem is especially acute across the largely poor central Indian belt that stretches from western Maharashtra State to the Bay of Bengal in the east: Over the last 70 years, extreme rainfall events have increased threefold in the region, according to a recent scientific paper, while total annual rainfall has measurably declined.

"Global warming has destroyed the concept of the monsoon," said Raghu Murtugudde, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland and an author of the paper. "We have to throw away the prose and poetry written over millennia and start writing new ones!" India's insurance policy against droughts, the Himalayas, is at risk, too. The majestic mountains are projected to lose a third of their ice by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at their current pace. But, as scientists are quick to point out, climate change isn't the only culprit to blame for India's water woes. Decades of greed and mismanagement are far more culpable. The lush forests that help to hold the rains continue to be cleared. Developers are given the green light to pave over creeks and lakes. Government subsidies encourage the over-extraction of groundwater.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Google on Monday fired four employees who had been active in labor organizing at the company (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), according to a memo that was seen by The New York Times. The memo, sent by Google's security and investigations team, told employees that the company had dismissed four employees "for clear and repeated violations of our data security policies." Jenn Kaiser, a Google spokeswoman, confirmed the firings but declined to elaborate.

The dismissals are expected to exacerbate rocky relations between Google's management and a vocal contingent of workers who have protested the company's handling of sexual harassment, its treatment of contract employees, and its work with the Defense Department, federal border agencies and the Chinese government. Tensions have increased as Google has cracked down on what had long been a freewheeling work culture that encouraged employees to speak out. Google recently canceled a regular series of companywide meetings that allowed workers to pose questions to senior executives and began working with a consulting firm hat has helped companies quell unionization efforts. Earlier this month, Google placed two employees, Laurence Berland and Rebecca Rivers, on administration leave, "saying they had gotten into confidential documents that were not relevant to their work," reports The New York Times. "They were among the four workers who were fired."

"In the memo, Google said the fired employees had repeatedly searched for, looked through and distributed information 'outside the scope of their jobs.' One of the workers set up notifications to receive emails detailing the work and whereabouts of other employees without their knowledge or consent, the memo said. 'This is not how Google's open culture works or was ever intended to work,' the memo said."