Qualcomm is making the case for why it didn't hurt competition in the smartphone chip business. "The company, represented by attorney Thomas Goldstein of the firm Goldstein & Russell, on Thursday appeared before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in downtown San Francisco," reports CNET. "Qualcomm is hoping the appeals court will overturn a ruling by a district court judge that declared it to be a monopoly and ordered it to renegotiate its licensing contracts." From the report: Qualcomm during the hearing didn't dispute that it has a monopoly in 3G and 4G LTE chips. But it maintains that it didn't wield that power to harm competition. "What has gone wrong in the competitive process?" Goldstein said. "The answer is nothing." He noted that Qualcomm's business practices could be an issue of contract violations but not an antitrust issue. The US Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, tried to make it clear how Qualcomm's "no license, no chip" policy undercut rivals and caused handset makers to shift business to Qualcomm. Brian Fletcher, an attorney who teaches at Stanford University, spoke for the FTC. He said Qualcomm is making it harder for competitors not because its policies have meant lower chip prices but "because it's demanding customers pay Qualcomm even when they decide to buy from rival suppliers."

The hearing is the latest twist in a legal saga that began three years ago when the FTC accused Qualcomm of operating a monopoly and forcing Apple and other customers to work with it exclusively. The FTC also accused the company of charging excessive licensing fees for its technology. As part of the district court's ruling, Qualcomm must submit compliance and monitoring reports for the next seven years and report to the FTC annually. Thursday's hearing marks Qualcomm's attempt to have that ruling overturned. The three appeals court judges likely won't make a decision for three months to over a year as they weigh the evidence.

They beat us at chess and trivia, supplant jobs by the thousands, and are about to be let loose on highways and roads as chauffeurs and couriers. Now, fresh signs of robot supremacy are emerging on Wall Street in the form of machine stock analysts that make more profitable investment choices than humans. From a report: At least, that's the upshot of one of the first studies of the subject, whose preliminary results were released in January. Buy recommendations peddled by robo-analysts, which supposedly mimic what traditional equity research departments do but faster and at lower costs, outperform their flesh-and-blood counterparts over the long run, according to Indiana University professors.

"Using this type of technology to make investment recommendations or to conduct investment analyses is going to become increasingly important," Kenneth Merkley, an associate professor of accounting and one of the authors, said by phone. Whether getting stock calls right is a critical mission of human analysts is debatable. Wall Street research departments serve a variety of functions, among them connecting investors with company executives and gathering earnings and other corporate data. While their buy, sell and hold recommendations still garner attention and can move stocks, the number of clients premising investment decisions off them is probably limited. The study looked at a small and still largely experimental branch of fintech, firms founded on the premise that digital technology does a better job than humans in making equity recommendations. While all analysts use computers, a handful of start-ups has been seeing if programs can handle every aspect of the stock-picking process.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A Philadelphia man has been freed after a federal appeals court ruled that his continued detention was violating federal law. Francis Rawls, a former police officer, had been in jail since 2015, when a federal judge held him in contempt for failing to decrypt two hard drives taken from his home. The government believes they contain child pornography.

After losing that appeal, Rawls raised another challenge: the federal statute that allows judges to hold witnesses in contempt for refusing to testify, passed in 1970, states that "in no event shall such confinement exceed eighteen months." The government argued that this provision didn't apply to Rawls because he was a suspect, not a witness. Also, the rule applies to a "proceeding before or ancillary to any court or grand jury." But because the government hadn't formally charged Rawls with a crime, the government argued, there was no court proceeding under way. Last week, a three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit rejected this argument in a 2-1 vote. The court's two-judge majority held that Congress had intended for the 18-month limitation to apply broadly to any legal proceeding, not just a formal trial. And while Rawls was a suspect in the case, he was also a witness. The practical result is that, at least in federal court, someone can only be imprisoned for 18 months for refusing to open an encrypted device. The government says it has other evidence suggesting that Rawls possessed child pornography, "so prosecutors may be able to piece together enough evidence to convict him, even without access to his encrypted hard drives," the report adds. "One of the two judges who formed the 3rd Circuit's majority urged the trial court judge to consider the four years of imprisonment Rawls has already served if he eventually has to sentence Rawls after a child pornography conviction."

Nikola Motors on Monday unveiled a concept for a new electric pickup truck called the Badger. Engadget reports: Nikola plans to offer the Badger as both a purely battery-electric vehicle and as an electric/fuel-cell hybrid. The company claims the hybrid powertrain model will feature a maximum range of approximately 600 miles, while the battery model will be limited to 300 miles. It also claims the pickup will be able to tow up to 8,000 pounds and accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in approximately 2.9 seconds. Those capabilities, if Nikola can deliver on them, would make the Badger mostly comparable to Tesla's Cybertruck. Since hydrogen fuel stations are few and far between, Nikola says it plans to build 700 hydrogen filling stations in the near future. "The company claims it has the first locations secured, but it won't announce them until later this quarter," adds Engadget.

Nikola will fully detail the Badger at its upcoming Nikola World 2020 event in September, at which point it will start accepting limited reservations as well.

Surprising absolutely nobody, Samsung officially announced the Galaxy Z Flip, its second stab at foldable phone, at its Unpacked event in San Francisco on Tuesday. From a report: The Z Flip is markedly different foldable than the Galaxy Fold, which launched to lukewarm reception and a whopping $1,980 price. Instead of a phone that unfolds open to a larger tablet-sized screen, the Galaxy Z Flip is a regular smartphone that folds closed into a smaller device. It's similar to the Motorola Razr. The Z Flip has a 6.7-inch OLED display that bends in half. Samsung says the "Infinity Flex Display" is the first one that is made of glass. Every foldable phone display has used plastic, which is more malleable, but less durable and scratch-resistant than glass. Underneath the folding screen, there's a Snapdragon 855+ chip. It's priced at $1,380 and starts shipping this Friday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Organic solar cells (OSCs) have a few advantages over other designs. They still collect energy from sunlight, but can be made more flexible, transparent (or at least semi-transparent) and can be tuned to only absorb certain wavelengths of light. That potentially makes them perfect for greenhouse roofing -- they can let most light through for the plants, while harvesting enough to offset a decent chunk of the facility's energy needs. "Plants only use some wavelengths of light for photosynthesis, and the idea is to create greenhouses that make energy from that unused light while allowing most of the photosynthetic band of light to pass through," says Brendan O'Connor, corresponding author of the study [from North Carolina State University]. "However, until now it wasn't clear how much energy a greenhouse could capture if it was using these semitransparent, wavelength selective, organic solar cells."

To begin to answer that question, the researchers modeled how much energy would be coming in from a greenhouse with OSCs in the roof, versus the amount of energy it would normally consume. The idea was to find the point where the greenhouse becomes energy neutral -- that is, it generates enough energy from the Sun to completely power itself. For this study, the theoretical greenhouses were modeled on the energy needed to grow tomatoes in three locations with different climates -- Arizona, North Carolina and Wisconsin. As a bonus, the OSCs are effective insulators too, helping maintain the right temperature. The team found that there would be a small hit to the amount of usable light the plants inside would receive, but the benefits would be worth it. In the famously sunny Arizona, for example, a greenhouse with OSCs installed could become energy neutral while blocking just 10 percent of the light the plants need. This shouldn't negatively affect the plants, the team says. In fact, the energy output could be doubled with just a little more light blocked. In North Carolina, sunlight is a little more sparse, so a greenhouse would need to block 20 percent of the photosynthetic light to become energy neutral. Chilly Wisconsin winters would be too much to ever achieve neutrality though, but these greenhouses could still generate almost half of their energy needs. The new study was published in the journal Joule.

According to CEO Elon Musk, Tesla appears to be ramping up installations of its solar tile roofs in the San Francisco Bay area, with plans to expand to Europe and China in the not too distant future. TechCrunch reports: The solar tile roof, which Tesla calls Solarglass, is being produced at the company's factory in Buffalo, N.Y. Musk announced in one of the tweets plans to host a "company talk" in April at the Buffalo factory, an event that will include media and customer tours of the facility. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment seeking more information about Solarglass, including how many installations have been made to date.

Four months ago, Musk said the company would begin installations in the "coming weeks" and that it hopes to ramp production to as many as 1,000 new roofs per week. In an earnings call last October, Musk suggested that the tiles were ready for a widespread deployment, noting that "version three is finally ready for the big time." The solar tile roof will initially be offered in textured black, but Musk reiterated Monday plans to offer other color and finish variants "hopefully later this year."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: In May 2019, South Korea's Interior Ministry announced plans to look into switching to the Linux desktop from Windows. It must have liked what it saw. According to the Korean news site Newsis, the South Korean Ministry of Strategy and Planning has announced the government is exploring moving most of its approximately 3.3 million Windows computers to Linux. The reason for this is simple. It's to reduce software licensing costs and the government's reliance on Windows. As Choi Jang-hyuk, the head of the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, said, "We will resolve our dependency on a single company while reducing the budget by introducing an open-source operating system."

How much? South Korean officials said it would cost 780 billion won (about $655 million) to move government PCs from Windows 7 to Windows 10. [...] Windows will still have a role to play for now on South Korean government computers. As the Aju Business Daily, a South Korean business news site, explained: Government officials currently use two physical, air-gapped PCs. One is external for internet use, and the other is internal for intranet tasks. Only the external one will use a Linux-based distro. Eventually, by 2026, most civil servants will use a single Windows-powered laptop. On that system, Windows will continue to be used for internal work, while Linux will be used as a virtual desktop via a Linux-powered cloud server. This looks to eventually end up as a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) model. The report notes that the Ministry of National Defense and National Police Agency are already using the Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS-based Harmonica OS 3.0.

"Meanwhile, the Korean Postal Service division is moving to TMaxOS," reports ZDNet. "The Debian Linux-based South Korean Gooroom Cloud OS is also being used by Defense and the Ministry of Public Administration and Security."

monkeyFuzz quotes Inverse: One of the problems with solar panels is that they don't generate electricity at night, so we have to store the electricity they generate during the day to power things during the evening. That works fine, but what if we could develop solar panels that did generate electricity at night? It's possible, and the way it works is pretty surprising.

Researchers from the University of California, Davis explain in a new paper that was just published in the journal ACS Photonics that if you want to create a solar panel that generates electricity at night, then you just have to create one that operates the exact opposite way solar panels work during the day. It's being referred to as the 'anti-solar panel.'
The paper's author explains to Inverse that as heat flows from Earth to outer space, "it's picking that off and converting that into power," using a thermoradiative cell instead of a photovoltaic cell, and he's now working with his team to develop prototypes.

And another paper in September from Stanford researchers also explored the idea of generating electricity at night.

The semiconductor industry last year suffered its worst annual slump in almost two decades, hurt by a trade war between the largest chip producer, the U.S., and the largest consumer, China. Bloomberg reports: Revenue fell 12% to $412 billion in 2019, the Semiconductor Industry Association said Monday in a statement. That's the biggest drop since 2001, when industry sales slumped 32% as the dot-com bubble burst. The rate of decline last year abated with sales growing slightly in the fourth quarter from the preceding three-month period, the industry association said. For that to continue, China and the U.S. need to build on the phase one trade agreement announced last month.

Memory chips were the hardest hit. Prices of those commodity chips fell as production outran demand. Memory revenue dropped 33% from 2018 led by declines in computer memory. All regions experienced a decline in demand. Sales in China, whose consumers and factories that supply finished products to the rest of the world account for more than one-third of global consumption of the electronic components, fell 8.7%, according to the SIA. Sales in the Americas dropped the most of any region at 24%.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: The University of Rochester research lab that recently used lasers to create unsinkable metallic structures has now demonstrated how the same technology could be used to create highly efficient solar power generators. In a paper published in Light: Science & Applications, the lab of Chunlei Guo, professor of optics also affiliated with Physics and the Material Sciences Program, describes using powerful femto-second laser pulses to etch metal surfaces with nanoscale structures that selectively absorb light only at the solar wavelengths, but not elsewhere.

A regular metal surface is shiny and highly reflective. Years ago, the Guo lab developed a black metal technology that turned shiny metals pitch black. "But to make a perfect solar absorber," Guo says, "We need more than a black metal and the result is this selective absorber." This surface not only enhances the energy absorption from sunlight, but also reduces heat dissipation at other wavelengths, in effect, "making a perfect metallic solar absorber for the first time," Guo says. "We also demonstrate solar energy harnessing with a thermal electric generator device." "This will be useful for any thermal solar energy absorber or harvesting device," particularly in places with abundant sunlight, he adds.

Japan's first robot bartender has begun serving up drinks in a Tokyo pub in a test that could usher in a wave of automation in restaurants and shops struggling to hire staff in an aging society. From a report: The repurposed industrial robot serves drinks in is own corner of a Japanese pub operated by restaurant chain Yoronotaki. An attached tablet computer face smiles as it chats about the weather while preparing orders. The robot, made by the company QBIT Robotics, can pour a beer in 40 seconds and mix a cocktail in a minute. It uses four cameras to monitors customers to analyze their expressions with artificial intelligence (AI) software. "I like it because dealing with people can be a hassle. With this you can just come and get drunk," Satoshi Harada, a restaurant worker said after ordering a drink. "If they could make it a little quicker it would be even better." Finding workers, especially in Japan's service sector, is set to get even more difficult.

MojoKid writes: When AMD unveiled its forthcoming Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core processor at CES 2020 this year, the company made no bones about comparing its performance to a many-core competitive platform from Intel. Under the hood of the yet formally released high-end workstation AMD chip are 64 physical cores capable of processing 128 threads in SMT, with a 2.9GHz base clock, 4.3GHz boost clock, and 256MB of L3 cache. All that horsepower resides in a single TRX40 socket with a 280 Watt TDP for a suggested retail price of $3990. Conversely, a dual socket Intel Xeon Scalable Platinum 8280 setup will sport 56 cores across two sockets with over a 400 Watt TDP that costs around $20,000. At CES, AMD showed its new 64-core Threadripper beating the dual Xeon Platinum setup in a 3D rendering application called VRAY, and today additional benchmark numbers have surfaced in SiSoft SANDRA, showing Threadripper 3990X out-scoring the Intel setup by around 18 percent. No doubt, AMD's Threadripper 3900X isn't a CPU for the average mainstream desktop user, but when the chips arrive to market in the near future, workstation and content creation professionals will likely be all over AMD's new 64-core beast chip.

There's a North American tradition that says there'll be six more weeks of winter if a groundhog can see his shadow (due to clear skies) on February 2nd.

And while it's been honored every year with a ceremony in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania since 1887, PETA is now suggesting that the event's organizers should stop using a live groundhog -- and replace him with a robot. The Morning Caller reports:
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said in a news release Tuesday it sent a letter calling for the current incarnation of Punxsutawney Phil to be sent to a "reputable sanctuary" to live out the remainder of his life. Phil, arguably the world's most famous groundhog, takes part in a ceremony every Feb. 2 at Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney. His handlers, also known as the Inner Circle, host festivities that culminate at 7:20 a.m., when they pull Punxsutawney Phil from a decorative stump so he can predict an early spring or six more weeks of winter.

"Gentle, vulnerable groundhogs are not barometers," PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman said in the release. "PETA is offering the club a win-win situation: Breathe life into a tired tradition and finally do right by a long-suffering animal... An AI Phil would renew interest in Punxsutawney, generating a great deal of buzz, much like Sony's robot dog 'aibo,' which walks, plays, misbehaves, and responds to commands...

"By creating an AI Phil, you could keep Punxsutawney at the center of Groundhog Day but in a much more progressive way."
One LiveScience article points out that "you'll be better off flipping a coin than going by the groundhog's predictions."

Or, as one PETA blog post explains, "To predict the weather you need a robot, not a terrified groundhog."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: General Motors is resurrecting the Hummer, best known as a gas-guzzling, military-style SUV, as an all-electric "super truck" with massive horsepower, acceleration and torque. The Detroit automaker confirmed the plans Thursday and released three online teaser videos for the "GMC Hummer EV" pickup ahead of a 30-second Super Bowl ad for the vehicle featuring NBA star LeBron James. The spot is scheduled to air during the second quarter of Sunday's game.

The Hummer EV pickup, according to GM, will feature 1,000 horsepower; 0 to 60 mph acceleration of three seconds; and 11,500 pound feet of torque. It didn't announce a price. The Hummer EV pickup is expected to go into production in the fall of 2021 at a plant in Detroit, followed by sales starting toward the end of the year. The teaser videos detail the specifications and preview the front of the pickup, which features a new iteration of Hummer's well-known slotted grille with "HUMMER" backlit across the front of the truck.

Rolls-Royce has announced that it plans to build, install, and operate up to 15 mini nuclear reactors in Britain, with the first set to go online in nine years. New Atlas reports: In a BBC Radio 4 interview with business journalist Katie Prescott on January 24, 2020's Today program, Paul Stein, chief technology officer for Rolls-Royce, said that the company is leading a consortium to produce factory-built modular nuclear reactors that can be delivered for assembly by ordinary lorries. Rolls-Royce believes that its consortium has got its sums right and can restart Britain's nuclear industry by building up to 15 Small Modular Reactors (SMR) with an expected value to the UK economy of $68 billion, another $327 billion in exports, and 40,000 new jobs by 2050.

Each power station is projected to have a service life of 60 years and generate 440 MW of electricity, or enough to power a city the size of Leeds. The estimated cost of the electricity generated is $78 per MWh. According to a previous press release from Rolls-Royce, the British government has already promised 18 million British pounds in matching funds, or about half the present costs of the endeavor, with the consortium partners providing the rest. Prescott says that the advantage of the Rolls-Royce plan is that it doesn't involve building a whole new reactor, as other companies have tried to do, but rather to adapt a present design. In addition, the reactors will be built along manufacturing lines rather than civil construction, which the company claims will drive down costs rather than inflating them.

UPDATE (10/15/20230: The court's order did not stand, and by 2023 Caltech had agreed to drop their lawsuit.

Below is Slashdot's original report from 2020:

The California Institute of Technology (CalTech) said it won a $1.1 billion jury verdict in a patent case against Apple and Broadcom. Reuters reports: In a case filed in federal court in Los Angeles in 2016, the Pasadena, California-based research university alleged that Broadcom wi-fi chips used in hundreds of millions of Apple iPhones infringed patents relating to data transmission technology. "While we thank the members of the jury for their service, we disagree with the factual and legal bases for the verdict and intend to appeal," Broadcom said in a statement. Apple said it plans to appeal the verdict, but declined further comment. The company had said in court filings that it believed all of the university's claims against it resulted from it using Broadcom's chips in its devices, calling itself "merely an indirect downstream party." The verdict awarded CalTech $837.8 million from Apple and $270.2 million from Broadcom. "We are pleased the jury found that Apple and Broadcom infringed Caltech patents," CalTech said in a statement. "As a non-profit institution of higher education, Caltech is committed to protecting its intellectual property in furtherance of its mission to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education."

Delivery giant UPS has ordered 10,000 electrical trucks from Arrival, a technology company based in the UK. The two companies hope to deploy the trucks across Europe and North America over the next four years. Engadget reports: If everything goes well, UPS has the option to buy another 10,000 vehicles. For now, the trucks are still in a prototype phase. The current iteration is 2.7 meters tall and designed for "walk-in and walk-out" use, according to Patrick Bion, Arrival's chief of product. The final version should have a battery pack "around about 75KWh," he explained, and offer roughly 250 kilometers (155 miles) on a single charge. The vehicle will use CCS, a popular charging standard that cleverly combines the slower Type 2 port with two large DC pins for rapid charging. Arrival has also previously confirmed that its trucks will use BlackBerry QNX, an enterprise-focused operating system designed for cars, robots and medical equipment.

The trucks will utilize a "skateboard" underbelly that Arrival hopes will translate across to all of its future vehicles. According to Bion, this covers "everything below the floor," including the suspension, brakes and steering. The design is flexible enough, however, that changes can be made for different customers and vehicle types. "We have the ability to change the wheelbase," Bion explained, "to add front-wheel drive, rear-wheel drive and all-wheel drive. We can also change the battery pack capacity so that the customer, if they only need 150 kilometers (90 miles) per day, doesn't have to pay for a bigger battery that could theoretically do more." Arrival's first UPS trucks will be built in Banbury, Oxfordshire, where it currently runs a research and development facility. The majority of the 10,000 order will be built "local to where it's needed," though, according to Bion. UPS also announced a pilot project with Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary and leading operator of self-driving vehicles. "UPS will use some of Waymo's self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans to shuttle packages between some of its stores in the Metro Phoenix area and its hub in Tempe, Arizona," reports The Verge. "The minivans won't be fully driverless; Waymo says it will keep trained safety drivers in the front seat to monitor operations."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Using a robot dropped through a 700-meter hole in the ice, scientists stationed on Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier have captured the first video of the glacier's grounding line, the mysterious boundary where ice meets land and where warm ocean water could be slowly melting the glacier's base -- putting it at risk of collapse (above). Battling 2 months of stormy conditions and temperatures lower than -30C in one of Antarctica's most inaccessible locations, the researchers drilled a hole and lowered the torpedo-shaped Icefin robot into the frigid ocean waters below. Icefin then swam more than 1 kilometer along a downward-sloping basin to the grounding line, a rocky ridge below sea level that supports the glacier's huge floating ice shelf. The researchers used cameras, sonar, chemical probes, and other sensors on Icefin to study the rapidly retreating Thwaites and its supporting sediment. Scientists are still sifting through the data. But they fear warm ocean water intruding underneath the glacier could eventually cause it to retreat from the ridge, leading to its ultimate collapse.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: For the third time in less than a year, Intel has disclosed a new set of vulnerabilities related to the speculative functionality of its processors. On Monday, the company said it will issue a software update "in the coming weeks" that will fix two more microarchitectural data sampling (MDS) or Zombieload flaws. This latest update comes after the company released two separate patches in May and November of last year.

Compared to the MDS flaws Intel addressed in those two previous patches, these latest ones have a couple of limitations. To start, one of the vulnerabilities, L1DES, doesn't work on Intel's more recent chips. Moreover, a hacker can't execute the attack using a web browser. Intel also says it's "not aware" of anyone taking advantage of the flaws outside of the lab. In response to complaints of the company's piecemeal approach, Intel said that it has taken significant steps to reduce the danger the flaws represent to its processors.

"Since May 2019, starting with Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS), and then in November with TAA, we and our system software partners have released mitigations that have cumulatively and substantially reduced the overall attack surface for these types of issues," a spokesperson for the company said. "We continue to conduct research in this area -- internally, and in conjunction with the external research community."