The ThinkPad P70.

On Friday, Intel quietly announced a new line of processors: "workstation-class" mobile Xeon processors using the new Skylake core. Today, Lenovo has announced the first laptops to use the new processors, the P70 and P50. They're monsters.

The P70 is a 17 inch device starting at 7.6 lbs. Along with its Xeon E3-1500M v5 processor (exact speeds haven't been unveiled just yet) and NVIDIA Quadro graphics, it supports up to 64GB ECC DDR4 RAM and up to four storage devices—a 2TB spinning hard disk, a 1TB PCIe SSD, and a DVD-RW that can be replaced with 1 TB hard disk and/or a 512GB SSD. As well as the usual USB3, HDMI, mini-DisplayPort, and gigabit Ethernet ports, the system also includes two Thunderbolt 3 ports for high speed connectivity, an ExpressCard slot, and an optional Smart Card reader. The P70 also embeds an X-Rite Pantone color sensor below the keyboard for color calibration on the go. Screen options are 1920×1080 with optional touch screen or a 3840×2160 non-touch screen.

The P50 is the P70's smaller brother. The screen size is cut to 15.6 inches, the weight to 5.6 lbs, the optical drive option removed, and the number of Thunderbolt 3 ports cut to one. Beyond that, however, it's essentially identical to the 17 inch version, just slightly more portable.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—From a viewing spot in a high bay room at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, I peer through a glass window at a cab that simulates the cockpit of a commercial aircraft. The 70-ton base of the Vertical Motion Simulator (VMS) moves the cab up and down like an amusement park ride.

“Are you guys thinking about flying?” Scott Reardon, the VMS facility manager, asks me and my co-worker Megan Geuss casually, as if we do this kind of thing every day.

There is only one answer to that question. Of course. We want to fly.

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The American Psychological Association (APA) has approved a ban on psychologists' involvement in national security interrogations.

The group approved its new ethics guidelines Friday in Toronto. The APA adopted the plan in the wake of 542-page independent investigation (PDF) that discovered psychologists worked with the Central Intelligence Agency to help silence dissent over harsh interrogation tactics being employed by the Bush administration (including torture). What's more, the report found that APA officials colluded with military officials to adopt APA ethics rules in order to allow psychologists to be a part of tortuous interrogations in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

Psychologists' involvement in torturous interrogations aided the President George W. Bush administration's assertions that the techniques, such as waterboarding, were legal. That's because having psychologists involved in interrogations helped the Justice Department draw up secret legal opinions saying that harsh interrogations were OK—and not torture—since health officials were taking part.

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We've written several times about what a huge, sprawling company Google is and how many projects the company has going at any given time. Now-former CEO Larry Page apparently agrees: as part of a big shake-up, Page announced today that he is now the CEO of "Alphabet," a brand-new company of which Google is just one part. Page will be CEO of Alphabet, and fellow Google co-founder Sergey Brin will be helping him run Alphabet in some capacity. Sundar Pichai is now the CEO of the subsidiary known as Google.

This is no mere rebranding. As Page writes, "Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights. Google will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Our two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG." All the Alphabet subsidiaries, including Google, will be using "segment reporting" to report their financial results separately as well.

Page describes the Google part of Alphabet as a "slimmed-down" company that still encompasses most of the things we think of as Google products—things like Google Now, Google Photos, and Google Maps are mentioned by name. Both Chrome and Android will continue under the Google banner. YouTube, which already operates as its own subsidiary under CEO Susan Wojcicki, will also remain under Google.

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After years of uninterrupted success, wind power experienced a bit of a pause around the start of this decade. Prices for hardware reversed a decline and bounced upwards slightly, with installations dropping accordingly. But a new report from the Department of Energy shows that this bounce is now over. The price paid for wind-generated electricity has now reached an all-time low, and construction is bouncing back. Still, regulatory uncertainty may now be creating a boom/bust cycle for wind.

The report starts by reviewing the size of the wind market in the US. In 2014, it represented a quarter of the new additions to the US' generating capacity, a bit down from the average of 2007-2014, when it represented a third. Just under five GigaWatts were installed by the US, placing it third, and well behind China's 23GW. China now has nearly doubled the US 66GW of cumulative capacity.

Because of the US' excellent wind resources, however, it led the world in generating electricity last year. As a percentage of a country's total electricity generated by wind, the US ranked 15th, at roughly five percent. There are sharp regional differences however, with nine states generating more than double that percentage of their electricity using wind, led by Iowa, which generated 29 percent of its energy from the air.

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SEATTLE—You know an e-sports event has made it when a crowd's patriotic chants swell into the tens of thousands. But the bigger surprise at this week's The International, currently the largest annual Dota 2 gaming tournament, was that those cries weren't loudest for the usual e-sports titans like Korea or China. This week, capacity crowds celebrated an American squad.

On Wednesday night of The International 2015’s main event, I was squeezed into the giant Key Arena crowd watching EHOME—a Chinese legacy team—duke it out with Evil Geniuses—the only North American squad ever to crack the top three at this Dota 2 championship. I was surrounded by streamers, team community managers, members of the press, and a few rowdy friends. A Chinese Dota 2 reporter sat beside me, cheering on each EHOME play with heavily accented English expletives.

EHOME slotted snugly into the middle of the packed and stacked Chinese squads (including popular teams like LGD) who had torn through The International's bracket, and the team’s every kill, escape, and feint prompted chants of “EHOME! EHOME!” from the Asian attendees, including my potty-mouthed neighbor. China has dominated the game’s competitive scene year after year, and that streak largely continued at this year's International. Chinese teams occupied two-thirds of the top six placing teams (each of which claimed more than a million dollars from the tournament’s $18 million prize pool).

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A number of modders working on an alternative online playspace for the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V say they had their Rockstar Social Club accounts blocked last week, barring them from playing the game or other Rockstar titles associated with the account.

FiveM is an in-development mod allowing Grand Theft Auto V owners to play together on dedicated servers, separate from the centralized, semi-persistent competitive/co-operative space of Grand Theft Auto Online. On Reddit over the weekend, FiveM subreddit moderator qaisjp detailed how he and two developers working on the mod—NTAuthority and TheDeadlyDutch—received ban notices on their Rockstar Social Club accounts in quick succession last week. The Social Club account bans mean they can't even access the single-player mode in their copies of Grand Theft Auto V, and it also blocks the use of any other games previously tied to that account, such as Max Payne 3.

"I believe these bans may be in relation to my existance [sic] on the FiveM project," TheDeadlyDutchi wrote on the Rockstar Support forum over the weekend. "I have not done any reverse engineering or other work on FiveM that may go against the TOS. I hope to resolve this soon."

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The video depicts a quiet flight from what looks like a rural property and headed toward some residences. Other than a few brief pauses to look around side-to-side, the drone flies smoothly ahead... until the last 22 seconds of the video. It hovers and tilts the camera toward the ground, observing a number of houses before it gets struck by the shotgun blasts and falls to the ground.

While the video has some strange jumps and cuts, possibly indicating it was edited, the pilot, David Boggs, said it was not.

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Is storytelling in video games a product of good gameplay, or can you get by with just a bunch of cut scenes? Do you even need the gameplay at all? In fact, what is gameplay? Is it a set of concrete, skill-based tasks designed to test the reflexes of your thumbs and fingers, or something far more nebulous than that? These are the questions that my overworked, Gamescom-addled brain found itself pondering after half an hour with Tacoma, the second game from Gone Home developer The Fullbright Company.

These are questions Gone Home raised too, of course. Like that game, Tacoma is a very different kind of experience, one where the story is the star, and where traditional video game mechanics and tropes are few and far between. I expect it'll prove as critically examined as its similarly inventive predecessor. But Tacoma is also very different; the transition from family home to futuristic space station means Tacoma is a little less intimate, a little more intimidating, and with a grander narrative at its core.

Sci-fi tends to do that, of course. The vastness of space lends itself well to stories with universal consequences. The trick with Tacoma, though, is that it's trying to keep itself grounded with a personal, exploratory story set amongst the stars.

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Terms like "industrial Internet" and "big data" often come across as examples of hype rather than anything that actual human beings rely on. But our talks with researchers at GE made it clear that these concepts are central features to some of the services the company offers. The conversations also revealed a lot about how different areas of research feed into useful products.

To try to put everything we saw together—research projects, computer models, high-end hardware, and building after building filled with labs—GE invited Sean Gallagher, Lee Hutchinson, and me to its research center in Niskayuna, New York for a wrap-up chat. It gave the three of us the chance to try to piece together what we saw at different research centers. We found that some of the work was distinctive: the sorts of issues the company is working on in India and China often focus on problems in those markets, while lots of the work in Germany and San Ramon could be applied anywhere.

But there were a few recurring themes as well. Big data was a key focus in San Ramon, but it was being put to use in places like India and Brazil to solve problems there. The physics-based models researchers were talking about in China were used by people in India to control entire wind farms in real-time. Rather than being buzzwords, these concepts are starting to become things that GE researchers expect to have available. Ultimately, the company's customers will eventually expect to have these services available, too.

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Windows RT, the unloved and unwanted ARM version of Windows 8, is getting an update in September. This update will include a new Start menu and lock screen... and for the moment, at least, that seems to be the extent of it.

Microsoft has a Windows 10 FAQ, and WMPU spotted that it recently changed to make mention of Windows RT. Windows 8.1 RT Update 3, as it appears to be known, will be released in September for Windows RT devices, and the FAQ claims vaguely that it will "improve" the Start menu and lock screen.

This will presumably make both of these things look closer to their substantially updated Windows 10 equivalents, though they may not be identical. WinBeta reports that according to its sources, the new Windows RT Start menu will not use the same code that the Windows 10 Start menu uses. Instead, it will be based on earlier code that was found in some of the Windows 10 Technical Previews.

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HTC and Samsung have patched serious vulnerabilities in some of their Android phones that made it possible for malicious hackers to steal user fingerprints. The researchers who discovered the flaws said that many more phones from all manufacturers may be susceptible to other types of fingerprint-theft attacks.

The most serious of the flaws was found on HTC's One Max handset. According to researchers at security firm FireEye, the device saved user fingerprints as an unencrypted file. Almost as bad, the BMP image was readable by any other running application or process. As a result, any unprivileged process or app could obtain a user's fingerprints by reading the file. Attackers could capitalize on the weakness by exploiting one of the many serious vulnerabilities that regularly crop up in Android or by tricking a target into installing a malicious app. HTC fixed the issue after FireEye privately reported it, according to this summary, which didn't provide a date or other details of the update.

A separate flaw found in both the HTC One Max and Samsung Galaxy S5 phones also put user fingerprints at risk by exposing the sensor to attackers. Consensus among security professionals is that the sensor should invoke the TrustZone protections provided by ARM chips the phones run. TrustZone allows sensitive operations to be isolated from the rest of the operating system in much the way that classified information belonging to governments isn't stored or transmitted over unclassified systems. FireEye researchers said most manufacturers fail to use the feature to protect the sensor operations.

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In healthcare professions, it’s common knowledge that married people have better overall health and lower mortality than their unmarried peers. However, a new study published in AJPH indicates that adults who are cohabitating have midlife health outcomes that are similar to adults in formal marriages. So in terms of the benefits specific to marriage, we can probably strike “longer, healthier life” from the list.

The study in question used 10,000 subjects from the British national Child Development Study, a birth cohort study that includes all people born in Britain during one week in March 1958. Participants were able to select their partnership status as married, cohabitating, or single. Health was measured using blood and inflammatory biomarkers, as well as respiratory capacity. The researchers controlled for previous socioeconomic status, previous health status, educational attainment, income, employment, and other demographic variables.

The study’s results varied by gender. Among men, those who had never married/cohabitated displayed poorer overall health than men who were married during the observation period. By contrast, not marrying or cohabitating had less of a detrimental effect on women than on men. For women, the timing of the marriage mattered. Those who were married in their late 20s or early 30s had the overall best health, beating out both women who had married in their early 20s and women were never married/cohabitating.

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Steven Michael

Despite making everyone's favorite electric vehicle (EV), Tesla still loses more than $4,000 on every Model S it sells, according to a report from Reuters. The report also says that Tesla has cut production targets for 2015 and 2016, and the company is also apparently considering raising more capital.

Tesla is still relying on a single model, its Model S sedan. During the second quarter 2015, it delivered 11,532 of these cars and made an operating loss of $47 million. Meanwhile, Tesla is hard at work on the forthcoming Model X SUV—due to arrive early next year—and 2017's Model 3, which should combine a 200-mile range with a $30,000 price tag. And there's the "Gigafactory," a Li-ion battery plant being built near the aptly named Sparks, Nevada.

With just one model on sale to support all its R&D, it's understandable why a share sale might be on the horizon. When you look at Tesla's finances the same way that GM and Ford report theirs (generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP), the company lost nearly $15,000 per car this last quarter. Although Tesla says this number is more than covered by income from EVs it leases direct to customers, designing and developing cars is neither cheap nor simple, and the company will need cash to grow into a multiple-model lineup.

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Low-overhead graphics APIs are all the rage these days, at least if you're the sort of person who gets excited about graphics APIs. iOS 8 introduced Metal last year, and OS X El Capitan will bring the API to the Mac when it's released this fall. The just-released Windows 10 includes DirectX 12, which will also come to Windows Phone when it gets updated later this year. And today Google announced that Android will be picking up support for Vulkan, the Khronos Group's low-overhead follow-up to OpenGL and OpenGL ES.

Like the other low-overhead APIs, Vulkan promises to improve performance by providing more direct access to the GPU—developers can manage memory and multiple threads on their own rather than leaving it up to the driver, giving them more work to do but also providing more flexibility. The difference is that, like OpenGL, Vulkan will be available for anybody and could theoretically be added to any and all of the major operating systems.

Like Metal and DirectX 12, Vulkan will require both operating system support and hardware support. Vulkan should be compatible with any GPU that currently supports OpenGL ES 3.1, which includes Qualcomm's Adreno 400-series GPUs and newer, Imagination Technologies' PowerVR Series 6 GPUs and newer, Nvidia's Tegra K1 and newer, and ARM's 600-, 700-, and 800-series Mali GPUs. That covers just about every high-end phone and tablet released between late 2014 and today.

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Scotland will ban the use of all genetically modified crops, according to the country's rural affairs minister. The country—which has been under majority rule of the Scottish National Party since 2011—wants to take advantage of new EU rules that allow devolved legislatures to restrict or ban the cultivation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). If successful, Scotland will face increased competition from farmers south of the border, where Conservative policy allows for cultivation of the controversial crops.

"Banning growing genetically modified crops will protect and further enhance our clean, green status," said rural affairs secretary Richard Lochhead in a statement. "There is no evidence of significant demand for GM products by Scottish consumers and I am concerned that allowing GM crops to be grown in Scotland would damage our clean and green brand, thereby gambling with the future of our £14 billion food and drink sector."

Lochhead’s announcement was met with apprehension from the National Farmers Union Scotland (NFUS). "This is simply going to make us less competitive," NFUS vice president Andrew McCornick told the Scotsman. "There is going to be one side of the Border in England where they may adopt biotechnology, but just across the River Tweed farmers are not going to be allowed to. How are these farmers going to be capable of competing in the same market?"

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COLOGNE, Germany—Thanks to its cutesy 2D visuals and run-and-gun platformer mechanics—staples of classic ‘90s games like Metal Slug, Contra, and Megaman—it would be easy to write off Mighty No. 9 as yet another predictable example of a developer cashing in on nostalgia. And while there’s no doubt that nostalgia has its part to play in Mighty No. 9, to only see it that way is to ignore and undermine the significant effect that a few innocuous-sounding changes have on the game’s otherwise classic formula.

But first, a refresher. The Kickstarter-funded, multi-platform, and sadly now-delayed-until-2016 Mighty No.9 comes from the mind of Keiji Inafune, the legendary ex-Capcom developer who’s had a hand in the likes of Resident Evil, Onimusha, and Street Fighter. He’s also the creator of Megaman, which might explain why Mighty No. 9’s protagonist Beck bears more than a passing resemblance to the legendary blue hero, but with just enough tweaks to avoid any legal wrangling. Despite the resemblance, though, Beck’s skill set gives him and the game a completely different feel.

Beck’s dash move changes up his primary skills of shooting and platforming. Perform a dash in mid-air and you fly forwards a short distance, allowing you to cross larger gaps, or avoid fire that unexpectedly comes from above or below. Multiple dashes greatly extend the time you can spend in the sky, and give you the freedom to charge through lengthy passageways at a rate significantly faster than on foot. More impactful than that, though, is how dash helps you dispatch enemies and earn power-ups. Typically, you’d keep shooting an enemy until it dies, but in Mighty No. 9, this prevents you from earning new abilities. Instead, after a few shots and a telltale glow, you dash into it to finish the job and acquire a time-limited bonus.

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Despite the very real threat climate change poses to human health and habitats, public awareness and concern varies greatly. And according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change, education is the single strongest predictor of climate change awareness. Additionally, the study reports that different factors drive the perception of risk from climate change in different areas of the globe.

These results suggest that improvements in basic education, climate literacy, and understanding how climate change affects local temperatures are key factors in increasing public support for limiting climate change.

The study used 2007-2008 Gallup World Poll data from 119 countries. The Gallup surveys were conducted via phone or in person with randomly selected, nationally representative samples. Respondents were asked how much they knew about climate change and how serious a threat climate change was to their families. Most of the research on public perceptions of climate change focuses on the US, Australia, and Europe, so this study is unique in that it includes a very large worldwide data set.

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While the Spanish town of Pamplona hosts the world's most well-known running of the bulls, other cities in Spain, Portugal, and nearby nations host their own annual runs where bulls run through city streets while locals and tourists run alongside—or away from—the giant beasts.

For one participant of a Sunday bull run in Villasecra de la Sagra, Spain, trying to share his experience by way of a smartphone recording ended traumatically. According to details ascertained from a local Spanish-language report, an English-language AFP report, and bystander video of the incident, a 32-year-old man was gored from behind while attempting to film that city's annual bull run.

The bystander video, posted Sunday on Instagram (not linked here due to its graphic nature), showed the currently unidentified victim standing near a barricade so that he was behind other viewers and away from the general fray of the bull run. However, a stray bull appeared to become separated from the general herd, at which point it ran at full speed behind the crowd and struck the 32-year-old while he was holding a smartphone to film in the opposite direction. According to reports, after receiving brief treatment at a nearby bullring's medical center, the victim was transferred to a hospital in nearby Toledo, where he was soon pronounced dead from neck and thigh wounds.

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On the menu tomorrow, August 10, at the International Space Station, Expedition 44 crew members will do something mankind has never before done—eat "fresh food grown in the microgravity environment of space" while in space.

This weekend NASA announced this small milestone as part of its ongoing plant experiment, Veg-01.The initiative aims to study "the in-orbit function and performance of the plant growth facility and its rooting 'pillows,' which contain the seeds." Monday isn't the first time anyone will study or taste some of the "Outredgeous" red romaine lettuce being grown on the ISS (as Engadget notes, the first batch of Veg-01 crop was sent back for study), but NASA has never before kept the crop in orbit for consumption. The organization notes this ability to create sustainable food is an important ingredient in the organization's long term plans to reach Mars.

"The farther and longer humans go away from Earth, the greater the need to be able to grow plants for food, atmosphere recycling and psychological benefits. I think that plant systems will become important components of any long-duration exploration scenario," said Dr. Gioia Massa, NASA payload scientist for Veggie at the Kennedy Space Center, according to the press release. "We hope to increase the amount and type of crop in the future, and this will allow us to learn more about growing plants in microgravity. We have upcoming experiments that will look at the impacts of light quality on crop yield, nutrition and flavor, both on Earth and in space."

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Updated August 10th @ 15:15 EDT (20:15 BST): The affected videos have all been brought back online. A Vimeo representative confirmed to Ars Technica that this was a result of the original complainant, Entura International, withdrawing its original takedown notice, which had incorrectly alleged that the videos in question contained footage from the Columbia Pictures film.

Original story

The Internet didn't really need another reason to hate July's critically panned Columbia Pictures film Pixels, but it got one in the form of a sketchy DMCA takedown. The request comes from a copyright troll, and it's directed at a number of videos hosted on Vimeo.

TorrentFreak got the scoop on Saturday by discovering a successful takedown request filed by Entura International, an "anti-piracy" organization acting on Columbia Pictures' behalf. Entura targeted films that had nothing to do with the Adam Sandler film, with the exception of having the word "Pixels" in their titles. One of those takedowns hit a 2006 short film titled Pixels, and its creators, the filmmaking group NeMe, took to Vimeo's support forums to express their disdain. They noted that the DMCA takedown request counted as a "strike one," in spite of allegedly not violating any of Columbia Pictures' copyrights. It forced the short film's creators to provide "an assortment of statements."

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What if I told you that recent experiments have revealed a revolutionary new method of propulsion that threatens to overthrow the laws of physics as we know them? That its inventor claims it could allow us to travel to the Moon in four hours without the use of fuel? What if I then told you we cannot explain exactly how it works and, in fact, there are some very good reasons why it shouldn’t work at all? I wouldn’t blame you for being sceptical.

The somewhat fantastical EMDrive (short for Electromagnetic Drive) recently returned to the public eye after an academic claimed to have recorded the drive producing measurable thrust. The experiments from Professor Martin Tajmar’s group at the Dresden University of Technology have spawned numerous overexcited headlines making claims that—let’s be very clear here—are not supported by the science.

The idea for the EMDrive was first proposed by Roger Shawyer in 1999 but, tellingly, he has only recently published any work on it in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and a rather obscure one at that. Shawyer claims his device works by bouncing microwaves around inside a conical cavity. According to him, the taper of the cavity creates a change in the group velocity of the microwaves as they move from one end to the other, which leads to an unbalanced force, which then translates into a thrust. If it worked, the EMDrive would be a propulsion method unlike any other, requiring no propellant to produce thrust.

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SEATTLE—The light show has settled, and two weeks of high-level, competitive video game play have come to a close. Yesterday, the Dota 2 International concluded at Seattle's Key Arena, and an American team took the top, $6.6 million prize—specifically, it was the American team Evil Geniuses, who had been profiled in an Ars report earlier this week.

Our contributor Steven Strom was at Key Arena all week covering the show, and we'll share his impressions soon. In the meantime, we took our cameras to catalog some of the capacity-crowd madness, so please enjoy a look at what it's like when one of Seattle's biggest entertainment districts—the Seattle Center, home of the Space Needle, the Seattle Opera, and the Experience Music Project—is overrun by fans of such heroes as Lina, Drow Ranger, and the Queen of Pain.

Welcome to Seattle's Key Arena.

46 more images in gallery

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COLOGNE, Germany—There was a time, not so long ago, where video games were obsessed with being more like the seminal third-person action-RPG Dark Souls. Difficulty levels rose, tutorials were removed, and checkpoint systems were crushed. N00bs needed not apply. Despite the rampant mimicry, nothing else has managed to nail that balance of difficulty, sharp combat, and ludicrous boss battles in the way that Dark Souls did.

Well, there is one exception: Hidetaka Miyazaki, director of Dark Souls, removed himself from the second game’s development team, instead choosing to direct the astonishingly good Bloodborne. The result was a game, in Dark Souls 2, that many dedicated Dark Souls fans perceived as the runt of the litter; Miyazaki’s absence leading to a dilution of the game's core pillars.

Thankfully, third time’s a charm. With Miyazaki back in the hot seat, Dark Souls 3 is looking like a fantastic return to form. But here’s the thing: Dark Souls 3, unlike other games, doesn’t want to be more like Dark Souls—it wants to be more like Bloodborne. The commercial and critical success of that PS4 exclusive has led to some interesting developments in Dark Souls 3, many of which fundamentally change the way the game plays. Most obvious is that movement speed has been slightly increased, providing more scope for dodging attacks.

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Maybe it was the marijuana speaking in a slow voice, telling a 20-year Iowa man to take a selfie with the police officer who was arresting him for allegedly driving while being stoned.

Or maybe Gilbert Phelps wasn't thinking at all when he asked his accuser, Officer Ben Hektoen, if he could take a selfie with him. The officer "happily obliged." The arrested man snapped away and immediately uploaded his masterpiece to SnapChat.

Man, 20, arrested for DUI took Snapchat "selfie" with arresting officer: http://t.co/fdZIkdAYKj pic.twitter.com/6mGF1D1PnF

— The Smoking Gun (@tsgnews) August 7, 2015

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Late yesterday, Intel announced that it would be releasing the first-ever workstation-grade Xeon CPUs for laptops. The company is "not quite ready to unveil all the details" including the exact specifications and TDPs of the chips and when they'll be available, but right now we know that they'll be based on the same Skylake architecture as the high-end desktop chips that Intel unveiled earlier this week. The Xeon E3-1500M v5 family also supports the same high-end features as its desktop counterparts, including error-correcting code (ECC) memory and the vPro business management features.

Perhaps most interestingly, Intel's press release says that every workstation that ships with one of these Xeons will include Thunderbolt 3 and, therefore, USB Type-C ports that support the full 10Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 transfer speed among the connector's other benefits. Thunderbolt 3 is available for consumer Skylake chips, but it requires an external controller—either Intel has baked Thunderbolt support into the mobile Xeon's chipset, or using the external controller is mandatory if you use the Xeon CPUs.

These Xeon chips are interesting, but don't expect to squeeze your octa-core desktop workstation into a laptop just yet.

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Did you hear the one about the cops not wanting to use a store's surveillance tape to help solve a crime?

Who could blame these Santa Ana cops? Video shows them smashing surveillance cameras, badmouthing a woman in a wheelchair, and perhaps even munching on marijuana-infused products after they stormed a medical marijuana shop in Southern California, which was being investigated for allegedly operating unlawfully in the city.

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Windows 10, in normal usage and typical configurations, will send quite a lot of information to Microsoft. Windows 8, in normal usage and typical configurations, will also send quite a lot of information to Microsoft. On the other side of the fence, OS X, in normal usage and typical configurations, will send some information to Apple. It's hard to imagine a modern day operating system that doesn't do this, at least to some extent.

For example, Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android all sport app stores. Buying from those app stores requires payment information, typically including a name, address, and credit card number. Those stores may have age-based restrictions, so might require a date of birth. Those purchases are, of course, tracked, to both ensure that developers get paid and that popularity lists can be constructed.

Different platforms have different twists on this. The iOS App Store, for example, can show you apps that are popular nearby; it must be recording some location data when purchases are made so it can make this correlation. Windows 10 goes in a different direction. It includes personalized "Picks for you" and can suggest particular apps, based on their similarity to apps that have been previously installed. This currently doesn't seem very intelligent; it will sometimes recommend apps that are already installed.

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The "MOBA" genre is a tough arena to break into—old and new game makers alike want in on the budding five-on-five online-battle genre, but they have to contend with deeply entrenched juggernauts Dota 2 and League of Legends. So when Blizzard Entertainment—the developers responsible for their fair share of juggernauts, including World of Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft, and Hearthstone—decided to make a MOBA move with this summer’s Heroes of the Storm, the result seemed like a real immovable object and unstoppable force situation.

Blizzard’s greatest strength, for the last 20 years, has been its ability to move into a genre and dominate it using two consistent strategies. Its games have consistently high production values, and its games are accessible in every way possible. The former is certainly present in Heroes of the Storm—which looks and plays great— but the latter is more important. For Blizzard, “accessible” means easier interfaces, lower required technical specifications, and a design philosophy aimed at ensuring the player constantly has something fun to do.

I’ve long been interested in the MOBA genre, thanks to its combination of strategy game-style controls and sports-like positions and improvisation, but my previous attempts to get into the genre had been cut short by unfriendly players and game mechanics. It’s hard to enjoy a competitive game where people are screaming at you for not immediately having the skill to keep up, or where the game itself offers very little encouragement and teaching. But Blizzard’s history of making their games accessible instantly piqued my interest—and now I’m fully invested in Heroes of the Storm.

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Have you played any Zynga games lately? Yeah, we didn’t think so. And that’s exactly the problem: in two years, the social gaming company’s daily average users (DAU) has plummeted from 39 million to 21 million.

Consequently, on Thursday, Zynga announced that it had lost $26.8 million in the second quarter of 2015, and a total of $73.3 million in the first half of the year.

Assuming that rate of loss holds, the company is on pace to lose over $150 million in 2015, and that’s on top of the over $472 million the company already lost from 2012 through 2014.

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Andrew Cunningham

The third-generation Moto G (left) next to the original.

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I was a big fan of the original Moto G when it launched. It couldn’t hold a candle to the parade of high-end phones that makes its way through the Orbiting HQ every year, but the original brought solid build quality, a decent display, and a modern bloatware-lite version of Android to a market segment served mostly by cut-rate garbage and old flagships.

The second-generation model was still fine but less impressive—it got bigger and got a slightly better camera, but it was a step backward in battery life and had substantially the same specs. The 2015 Moto E complicated matters further by adding LTE and a faster chip to a phone that cost even less, though it was still a step down from the G in other ways.

For the third-generation Moto G, Motorola has managed to put together something that outdoes the first model in every important way. It's a better-looking, more customizable phone with better CPU performance, LTE connectivity, an option to double your RAM, an actually respectable camera, and good battery life. The Moto G's job is to provide the full Android experience for a third of a flagship's price, and it's a job the phone does well.

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Video: Movies that predicted the future. (video link)

But rather than just leaving it there, we wanted to go a little further with some jumping off points for discussion. I combed through my movie library and came up with a half-dozen more movies that were set in the near future (and some of those "future" dates are now in our present-day past!). All of these films showcase some kind of vision of the way things could have been—though in most cases, it’s probably good that the future has taken a different course.

2010 (1984)

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Two trends are interacting in the car world right now, and I'm fascinated by the questions being raised as a result. First, people are keeping their cars longer. At the same time, new cars are more like mobile computers than the purely mechanical machines most people are familiar with—Ars boss Ken Fisher told me once that cars would be the first properly successful wearable device, and I think he's being proved right. This often results in a degree of culture shock when people used to the old way of doing things get exposed to a new car, particularly if they didn't see anything wrong with the status quo.

Computers are in control of everything, modulating our control inputs and interpreting our intent. For example, between your foot and the pedals of a hybrid are complex software routines that decide how to juggle internal combustion engines and conventional brakes with electric motor-generator units when it comes to stopping and going. Cheap, rugged, and powerful electronics can let an engineer solve a suspension or engine problem with some code instead of mechanical fix. Is that a good thing, or is the solution an artificial one?

Americans are spending more time away from car showrooms than in the past. I'm one of them; my newest car is a 2005 Saab 9-2x Aero (one of the finest examples of badge engineering out there), which shares a garage—or would if I had one—with a 19-year old Mazda Miata. I doubt there's a single defining reason for this trend, more like an interplay between better reliability, less cheap credit, some degree of economic uncertainty, and probably a few other factors I haven't thought of.

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It's that time of year again: Buzzfeed's John Paczkowski reports that Apple's next iPhone event is going to happen on the week of September 7th, and that currently the 9th is the most likely date. Paczkowski previously reported for Re/code, where he established a track record for accurately predicting Apple event dates.

Apple usually launches new iOS versions on Wednesday the week after the announcement, which means we could get iOS 9 on or around September 16th. If the company holds to its strategy for previous iPhone launches, any new models would follow on that Friday, September 18th. Rumors say that Apple is also planning to announce a new Apple TV and SDK at the September event.

What little we know about the new iPhones suggests we're in for an "S" year, one where we get various internal upgrades without an external redesign. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have both been enormously successful for Apple, so there's no real pressure to change the way they look. Current rumors suggest that the biggest addition will be support for Force Touch, the pressure-sensitivity feature introduced in the Apple Watch and in some recent Macbooks' Force Touch trackpads. Improvements to performance and to the camera are also pretty safe bets.

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Verizon Wireless today announced a new set of wireless data plans, and none of them are available with contracts or phone subsidies.

It's not clear from Verizon's announcement whether it's going to completely stop offering contracts and device subsidies to new customers after these plans become available on August 13. Since the announcement doesn't say anything about killing existing plans, it's possible that the company could still offer traditional two-year contracts, but without promoting them. We've asked Verizon about this and will provide an update if we get one.

(UPDATE: A Verizon spokesperson responded, "Yes, that is correct," when we asked if the company will no longer offer contracts and device subsidies.)

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The Bangladesh branch of Al-Qaeda is claiming responsibility for Friday's murder of a secular blogger in the capital city of Dhaka, the fourth blogger in Bangladesh slaughtered with machetes this year alone.

Murdered blogger Niloy Neel.

According to the monitoring group SITE, Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) branch Ansar al-Islam warned of more murders of bloggers to come in the Muslim-majority country: "In a communique issued in Bengali and English, and posted on its Facebook and Twitter accounts on August 7, 2015, Ansar al-Islam declared the attack to be 'vengeance' for the honor of the Prophet Muhammad, and vowed similar operations in the future against its enemies. The group threatened: 'If your ‘Freedom of Speech’ maintains no limits, then widen your chests for 'Freedom of our Machetes.'"

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A website in Russia has been caught exploiting a serious zero-day vulnerability in Mozilla's Firefox browser, prompting the open-source developer to deliver an emergency update that fixes the flaw.

The bug in a built-in PDF reader allowed attackers to steal sensitive files stored on the hard drives of computers that used the vulnerable Firefox version. The attack was used against both Windows and Linux users, Mozilla researcher Daniel Veditz wrote in a blog post published Thursday. The exploit code targeting Linux users uploaded cryptographically protected system passwords, bash command histories, secure shell (SSH) configurations and keys. The attacker downloaded several other files, including histories for MySQL and PgSQL and configurations for remina, Filezilla, and Psi+, text files that contained the strings "pass" and "access" in the names. Any shell scripts were also grabbed.

The attack targeting Windows users appeared to go after files of interest to software developers. The targeted data included subversion, s3browser, and Filezilla configurations files, .purple and Psi+ account information, and site configuration files from eight different popular FTP clients. Firefox users running Apple's OS X weren't targeted. The exploit was served in an advertisement on an undisclosed Russian news site, but Veditz said he couldn't rule out the possibility that other sites also hosted the attack. Some of those may have targeted Macs in addition to Windows and Linux.

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Yesterday, one of New Zealand's major energy producers announced that it is planning on shuttering the last of the country's coal-fired power stations in 2018. The plant's extended life comes despite the fact that running it has become economically marginal—the company that runs it says it is locked into a coal delivery contract until mid-2017 and has substantial stockpiles on site.

New Zealand is fortunate to have abundant renewable energy sources, including a number of large hydroelectric plants. Fossil fuels have mostly been used to supplement the hydroelectric production during years of lower rainfall. But the country has also benefitted from trends that are seen in most other industrialized nations. Energy demand has largely been stable due to increased efficiency, while the cost of other renewable power sources has dropped.

In New Zealand's case, those new sources are wind and geothermal (part of the country sits atop a subduction zone). As the costs of developing wind and geothermal have dropped, the coal fired plant was being used less frequently. "These units have largely been operating at the margin of the market for a number of years, at very low utilisation rates," said company CEO Albert Brantley. Shuttering them is expected to save the company over NZ$20 million a year.

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The Federal Communications Commission annual analysis of the state of the country's broadband market may undergo a shift, with an added emphasis on quality. Proposed changes to the analysis include looking at pricing and data caps and new focuses on connection quality and mobile data.

The FCC is required by Congress to determine whether broadband Internet service is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. If the answer is "no," the FCC must "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market."

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler raised the bar in January of this year when he spearheaded a vote to redefine broadband speeds as 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream, compared to the 4Mbps/1Mbps definition the FCC had used in previous years. Now he wants to move beyond speed and evaluate broadband against a variety of factors, including reliability, prices, and data caps. In other words, the next analysis would examine not just whether broadband service is available, but also whether it is affordable, works well, and is not hindered by data limits.

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In healthy galaxies, new stars are formed from the interstellar medium (ISM), the supply of gas and dust between stars. But sometimes cosmic winds—the movement of material between galaxies—can sweep a galaxy's interstellar medium clean, putting a damper on new star production there.

A lot of the specifics about this sweep-out are unknown—specifics like how easily it happens and under what physical conditions, and whether dense, star-forming clouds can survive these winds for any length of time. However, a new study on cosmic winds has observed the process with unprecedented detail, revealing complex and fascinating subtleties never before witnessed.

The study made use the Hubble Space Telescope, which imaged a spiral galaxy 300 million light-years away. The galaxy’s orbital path within the Coma Cluster takes it close to the cluster's center, pushing it through the hot, ionized gas (or plasma) of the intracluster medium (ICM). The plasma winds from the ICM then blow against the galaxy’s ISM, creating what’s called "ram pressure"—the pressure an object experiences as it moves through a fluid.

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