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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In May, the database giant failed in its bid to have Google stump up $9bn on Android and stake a sweeping claim over APIs and how they're broadly used. And now, this week, Oracle was ordered to pay Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) $3bn for reneging on a commitment to put its software on HPE's Itanic servers.

That figure is the size of Oracle's entire cloud business during a single quarter. It might seem as though Oracle is in court quite a lot, but to be fair it's probably not – most likely less than the headlines suggest, and less than those involved in the smartphone sector in recent years.

There's a lot of litigation in the field of technology. It attracts cases like a road kill does flies because there's so much money involved – both present and future potential. At one point in smart phones, it resembled the final scene of Reservoir Dogs, with everybody firing at everybody else. And yes, Oracle is right to both defend its trademarks and copyrights and to protect its business by law, should it feel the need.

[...]

It's just that Oracle's cases are bigger and make greater claims to unfairness. Oracle is not a retiring company, so its legal disputes are that much bigger.

Case in point: the firm's response to an employee claiming malpractice – probably falsely – in its cloud business accounting has been, guess what? Threatening to throw the legal juggernaut at the individual.

Now, Oracle isn't letting the HPE case go, and as you would expect, has vowed to appeal.

"It is very clear that any contractual obligations were reciprocal and HP breached its own obligations. Now that both trials have concluded, we intend to appeal both today's ruling and the prior ruling from Judge Kleinberg," executive vice president and general counsel Dorian Daley said in a statement.

[...]

At this point, it would seem that Oracle's time would be better served devising a sustainable way out of the place where its business now resides instead. ®

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Google has purchased the entire 12-year supply of power from a 50-turbine wind farm that is due to finish its construction in 2017.

[...] The farm, due to be completed in 2017, will be used to power Google's European data centres, Reuters reports. The search giant has also bought the entire power output of a second wind farm in Sweden, which is due to be built in 2018. The two power plants will supply 236 megawatts in total.

"[The additional wind farms] take us one step closer to running 100 percent of our operations on clean energy," said Marc Oman, EU energy lead of Google global infrastructure on the company's European blog.

See additional coverage and details on Reuters.

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edIII writes:

Parts of feathers have been discovered before, but these two dinosaur-era bird wings, however, "come complete with bone, skin, muscle, tissue and tracts of feathers".

While it’s generally agreed that virtually all dinosaurs had feathers, scientists have to base their conclusions on findings that tell very little. The few dinosaurs that became fossilized feathers and all, like the famous Archaeopteryx, only provide a 2-D picture with no depth — besides they’re also rare.

“The biggest problem we face with feathers in amber is that we usually get small fragments or isolated feathers, and we’re never quite sure who produced [them],” says co-author Ryan McKellar, curator of invertebrate palaeontology at Canada’s Royal Saskatchewan Museum. “We don’t get something like this. It’s mind-blowingly cool.”

Unfortunately, this did not lead towards any new information about which came first, the chicken or the egg.

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Appalbarry writes:

The GF and I are at the point where we're considering life after employment.

We do not belong to that legendary 2% who are rich through inheritance, nor to the 4% who have been able to save 10% of every paycheque since age ten.

We've been mostly self employed, so missed the boat on the era when employers provided pensions, and even had permanent employees, and we have the misfortune to live in a country with a decidedly crappy retirement scheme. Yeah, $650 CDN a month is luxury!

What we do have is a fairly paid off home in Vancouver, which we hope to sell before the bubble pops.

We're looking at a) Brexit, and the aftermath of that mess; b) Trump, and the aftermath of that mess; c) climate change, and the aftermath of that mess; and d) the sense that the whole economic system could be reaching the point where the house of cards collapses.

So, two people, retired, modest income, a reasonable nest egg from a house sale, and one Canadian and one British passport, with criteria of: low housing and living costs, reasonably warm weather, good and affordable wine, decent health care, and some kind of interesting cultural environment.

We've looked at Montreal, a city that we love; Greece, on an island away from tourists; the south of France; and some of the lesser regions of the UK; and would love to hear from others in similar circumstances who have made the plunge.

The US has been ruled out for some pretty obvious reasons, as have any of the 'Stans.

So tell us Soylentils, where should we escape to?

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fork(2) writes:

An unusual type of wind-blown sand ripple has been discovered on Mars. From Astronomy magazine:

Utilizing NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, Mathieu Lapotre, a PhD Candidate in Planetary Geology at California Institute of Technology, and his team discovered the new sand using data from the Mast Camera and Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on Curiosity and the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) on the orbiter. Two types of wind ripples occur naturally on Earth's deserts; small ripples and large dunes says Lapotre.

"Modern Mars has one additional bedform type: decimeter-scale ripples, meter-scale ripples, and large dunes," says Lapotre. "It is the intermediate size bedform that appears to be foreign to terrestrial landscapes."

[...] As the density of the Martian atmosphere predicts the size and spacing of the wind-blown ripples, the team's findings may infer past atmospheric conditions on Mars. In 2007, NASA's Opportunity rover found sandstone at the Burns Formation, a geologic formation on Burns Cliff, that possessed these wind-drag ripples.

[...] "A more complete and continuous record of wind-blown sandstones covering the duration of Mars' atmospheric decline would enable planetary geologists to better understand what made Mars the barren planet we know today," says Lapotre.

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An Indian student has been sent to jail for cheating after she failed a retest.

Ruby Rai, 17, ranked first in the Bihar state exams - but said in a video interview that her main subject, political science, was about cooking. After the video went viral, Ms Rai was made to re-sit her exams, and was arrested after she failed and had her original results cancelled. Examiners who retested Ms Rai told reporters they were "shocked" by her performance. When asked to write an essay about the Indian poet Tulsidas, she only wrote "Tulsidas ji pranam (Salutations to Tulsidas)".

Meanwhile, arrest warrants have been issued for several other students who performed well in the exams, including Saurabh Shrestha who topped the science stream, but later could not say that H2O was water. Last year, parents of students in the state were photographed climbing school walls to pass on answers.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36639321

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butthurt writes:

The Telegraph reports that a Syrian refugee living in Germany has turned over €50,000 in cash and "savings accounts books worth more than €100,000" which he found in a wardrobe given to him by charity. German law entitles him to a 3% reward which could amount to €4,500. Had he kept the money, it would have been enough to bring his two brothers to Germany: "But Allah would never allow it, to finance your own interests with someone else's property," he said.

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fork(2) writes:

ScienceDaily reports on new technology for high-density, high-capacity storage.

High-density high-capacity recording (memory) devices for storage of a vast amount of data have become important due to the information explosion today. Spintronics devices, which utilize characteristics of both the charge and spin of electrons to record information, are attracting much attention as a type of memory device. However, it has been pointed out that the spintronics elements are difficult to use in high integration due to their complex structures and they require a high level of write current.

Now a research team at National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA) and Tokyo University of Science, Japan, jointly developed a device capable of controlling magnetism at a lower current level than conventional spintronics devices.

A research team of International center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA), consisting of postdoctoral fellow Takashi Tsuchiya (currently at Tokyo University of Science), group leader Kazuya Terabe, and Director Masakazu Aono, developed a device capable of controlling magnetism at a lower current level than conventional spintronics devices, with lecturer Tohru Higuchi at Tokyo University of Science. The new device was fabricated by combining a solid electrolyte with a magnetic material, and enabling insertion/removal of ions into/from the magnetic material through application of voltage. Because the device has a simple structure and is capable of high integration, it may lead to the development of totally new high-density high-capacity memory devices with low power consumption.

[...] The technique developed in this study, which takes advantage of ionic motion, enables spintronics devices to control magnetism at a lower current level than conventional devices, allows them to have a simple structure, and makes them capable of high integration. Furthermore, the whole of the device is made of solid materials, preventing liquid leakage from occurring. Because of these advantageous features, this technique is expected to enable the development of high-density high-capacity memory devices with low power consumption, using conventional semiconductor processes.

This study was published in the online version of ACS NANO on January 6, 2016.

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fork(2) writes:

From SpaceNews we learn that NASA announced yesterday (July 1) that the Dawn spacecraft will remain in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres. Project officials had proposed sending Dawn to the asteroid 145 Adeona, a main belt asteroid about 150 kilometers across that Dawn would fly by in May 2019.

From the article:

Jim Green, director of NASA's planetary science division, said in a statement that the decision to keep Dawn at Ceres was driven by the science it would provide in the opinion of the senior review panel. "The long-term monitoring of Ceres, particularly as it gets closer to perihelion -- the part of its orbit with the shortest distance to the sun -- has the potential to provide more significant science discoveries than a flyby of Adeona," he said.

Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator for Dawn, said in a June 28 presentation at a meeting of the Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory that the project proposed the Adeona flyby because they believed visiting a different asteroid would be of more interest than remaining at Ceres.

Dawn, she noted, had completed all of its main scientific priorities at Ceres earlier this year. "I think we've gotten so much already that the incremental amount of knowledge that we would gain would be maybe not as great as one would have thought," she said of an extended mission at Ceres.

The extended mission was made possible by efforts to conserve the spacecraft's supply of hydrazine, begun in 2012 while in orbit around the asteroid Vesta. Hydrazine is used for station keeping (orbital maneuvers made by thruster burns that are needed to keep a spacecraft in a particular assigned orbit) and attitude control thrusters.

"The team worked very hard to execute an aggressive and persistent campaign to preserve the hydrazine," Raymond said, crediting "exceptionally smooth" operations of the spacecraft that limited consumption of the fuel. "In 2016, we ended up not only achieving our intended mission, but with a surplus which we can now use to do something else."

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HughPickens.com writes:

Scientists have discovered that plants may be smarter than you'd think as Joanna Klein writes in "The New York Times" that new research has discovered that plants can make risky decisions that are as sophisticated as those made by humans, all without brains or complex nervous systems and they may even judge risks more efficiently than we do.

Researchers showed that when faced with the choice between a pot containing constant levels of nutrients or one with unpredictable levels, when conditions are sufficiently poor a plant will pick the mystery pot. “In bad conditions, the only chance of success is to take a chance and hope it works out, and that’s what the plants are doing,” says Nick Chater.

The team took pea plants and split their roots among two pots. Both pots contained the same average levels of nutrients, but while nutrients in one pot remained at a steady level, nutrients in the other pot varied over the course of the three-month experiment. After three months, the researchers weighed the roots in each of the pots. They found that when average nutrient levels were low, the peas grew more roots in the variable pot. On the other hand, when nutrient levels were high, the plants favored the steady pot. “It raises a question, not about plants, but about animals and humans, because if plants can solve this problem simply,” then maybe humans can, too, says Hagai Shemesh. “We have a very fancy brain, but maybe most of the time we’re not using it.”

This complex behavior in a plant supports an idea, known as risk sensitivity theory, that scientists have long had trouble testing in insects and animals. It states that when choosing between stable and uncertain outcomes, an organism will play it safe when things are going well, and take risks when times are hard. Risk sensitivity theory explains why people gamble more when they’re losing money, or why birds that must eat enough food to survive a cold night will forage not knowing what they’ll find, rather than settle for a certain, but insufficient amount of food.

In terms of risk-sensitivity theory, Alex Kacelnik says the plants “did exactly what was expected from them.” In fact, Kacelnik added, “the plants have behaved even more clearly, with respect to risk, than we actually have found in animals.” How brainless pea plants evaluate risk is still unclear, but Shemesh thinks they must be following simple rules, not reasoning. “Even if you have no cognition or fancy nervous system, you can still get some pretty complicated behavior.”

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fork(2) writes:

Writing in Nature today (July 1), Elena Bozhkova reports on a paper by sociologists Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman which appeared on 23 June in American Sociological Review. She says, "Young people with parents in highly paid professions still take most of the jobs in science, an analysis of UK labour data suggests. But once they enter a science career, people from different backgrounds tend to earn similar wages, according to the study."

Sociologists have chronicled multiple ways in which the science community does not reflect the diversity of society -- including imbalances in gender, race and ethnicity. Studies often find, for example, that women and minorities face a 'glass ceiling' that prevents them from advancing to the top levels of their careers. Now, Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman, two sociologists at the London School of Economics, have looked at scientists through the prism of socioeconomic class, looking for evidence of a barrier to entry, or 'glass floor'.

[...] [Looking at data from the UK Labour Force Survey collected in from July to September 2014] their analysis included almost 44,000 people between the ages of 23 and 69, around 5,000 of whom were high-status professionals, including 256 scientists.

Laurison and Friedman found that if people from a working-class background get a high-paying professional job -- such as law, finance and medicine -- they earn about 17% less than people from privileged backgrounds. But for those in science professions, there is no difference in earnings.

[...] Friedman says that he and Laurison have recently repeated their analysis with twice as many data, adding statistics from 2014 and 2015, and found highly similar results. In follow-up work, the authors also looked at data from the French Labour Force Survey. "The science-specific results in both France and the United Kingdom are strikingly similar," Friedman says.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The 3GPP has told the industry to get cracking on standardising the air interface for 5G.

The standards body wants the “5G New Radio” (NR) to be frozen by June 2018, which should help vendors have devices ready for the planned 2020 date for 5G standards to be ready to fly.

Behind the radio, there will be two architectures: one, called standalone, will be all-5G with a new control plane; the other, non-standalone, will graft the new air interfaces onto the LTE control plane.

The air interfaces will have to support both sub-6 GHz frequency, and the emerging bands above 6 GHz.

The standardisation effort will target “enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), and “ultra-reliable and low latency communications” (URLCC) applications. The latter, Vulture South believes, is a cumbersome way of describing the much-touted Internet of Things.

By September 2016, the 3GPP work plan stipulates that the requirements for the radio interfaces be completed. Layer 1 and Layer 2 specs would then be completed by December 2017, with an initial focus on licensed bands.

The 3GPP announcement stresses that both radio and protocol design be forward compatible, “as this will be key for phasing-in the necessary features, enabling all identified usecases, in subsequent releases of the 5G specification”. ®

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takyon writes:

Google's Madrid, Spain offices have been raided as part of a broad European campaign against the company's alleged tax avoidance:

Google's Madrid offices are its latest to be raided as the search giant faces a series of tax probes across the European Union. The raid was approved by a court in Madrid, Reuters reported, following a request by the Spanish tax authorities. Reuters cited a spokeswoman giving the company's rote statement on such matters, saying that Google had complied with all regulations and legislation regarding financial matters in every territory in which it operated, and it was also working with the Spanish tax authorities to answer its questions.

The Spanish raid follows similar action in France, where Google was alleged to have underpaid tax by £1.2bn. Meanwhile the UK earlier this year made a £130m settlement with Google, averaging a mere £13m a year in tax paid for the duration of a dispute over accounts for revenues booked in the UK.

Back in the States, Senator Elizabeth Warren has been railing against Silicon Valley companies:

Potential vice-president and Wall Street critic Elizabeth Warren has accused tech giants Apple, Amazon and Google of undermining competition and using their political clout to kill off efforts to place limits on them. Giving the keynote [PDF] at a one-day conference titled "America's Monopoly Problem," the senator warned: "Today, in America, competition is dying." She cited a number of industries including Wall Street, the airline industry, cable companies, healthcare and livestock and pointed out that there are fewer companies in each, leading to less competition and record profits at the cost of consumer choice.

It was the tech industry, however, that bore the brunt of her criticism. "The second reason the decline in competition should cause concern is that big guys can lock out smaller guys and newer guys," she said. "Take a look at the technology sector – specifically, the battle between large platforms and small tech companies." She names names: "Google, Apple, and Amazon in many cases compete with those same small companies, so that the platform can become a tool to snuff out competition."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story on CNet::

If you're sick of having your view of Adele obscured by a thousand iPhones trying to film her, things are looking up. Apple was awarded a US patent this week for a system that can force your iPhone into disabling video-recording functions at concert venues.

The system uses infrared signals to send messages to your phone to tell it to shut down video recording. Apple's patent illustration shows a phone at a concert with the words "recording disabled" on screen.

[...] It's not known whether Apple plans to put the patent into use, and the company did not respond to a request for comment.

Too bad there are no other phones with video cameras and there is no way to construct an IR filter to fit over the camera lens.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36687631

A US woman has been sentenced after she sent Stephen Hawking multiple threatening emails and stalked him near where he was attending a conference in Spain:

A US woman has been given a suspended four-month jail sentence in Spain for threatening to kill British physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking.

The 37-year-old has also been banned from approaching to within 500m of the scientist or communicating with him on social media for eight months.

The woman was arrested in a hotel in Tenerife, close to where Prof Hawking was attending a conference.

She had stalked him on social media before following him to the island.

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