Why you should buy a diesel car right now — or keep the one you own

Volkswagen is in a world of hurt. So are Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and the others who sell diesel passenger cars. Diesels are distressed properties which, ironically, make them a great deal if you’re in the market for a new car. Seriously: Buy a diesel now. If you’re thinking of investing in VW stock, that’s a different matter. It’s hard to say if the market has fully digested all the bad news.

This AI algorithm can match the average American on real SAT questions

Yeah, yeah — of course a computer won at a math competition. That’s not the point. This story, which concerns a rather amazing program called GeoS from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), is about the ability of AI to usefully engage with the world. To a computer, with a brain literally structured for these sorts of operations, the math SAT is not a test on calculation, but reading comprehension. That’s why this story is so interesting: GeoS isn’t as good as the average American at geometry, it’s as good as the average American at the SAT itself.

Mozilla fixes 14-year old Firefox bug, turbocharges Adblock Plus

Last year, Mozilla published a blog post in which it noted that popular ad-on Adblock Plus could, under certain circumstances, drastically increase memory usage in Firefox. The problem was related to how Firefox handled ABP’s style sheets and could, in certain edge cases, send memory usage rocketing up to 2GB. While not necessarily a problem for relatively high-end systems, plenty of midrange computers get grumpy if a process sucks down that much RAM — and applications that use that much memory also have a tendency to bog down in general. Firefox 41, released yesterday, solves this problem, with impressive results.

Court rules cell phone passcodes protected under Fifth Amendment

The federal district court in Eastern Pennsylvania has ruled that plaintiffs in the case SEC v. Bonan Huang et al cannot be compelled to give up the passcode to their cell phones. At issue was whether the defendants could be forced to give up passcodes to devices that were provided by their employer, but secured by passcodes chosen by the employees themselves.

The question of whether or not defendants can be required to unlock a personal device has generally been answered “No,” but the SEC argued that these were products owned by a corporation and merely provided to employees. The men in question, Bonan and Nan Huang, are accused of insider trading, turning a $150K initial investment into more than $2.8 million through illegal profiteering.

VW diesel scandal spreads to Audi, Porsche — and possibly even BMW

Fallout from the Volkswagen diesel scandal continues to grow, as this morning brings reports that Audi’s head of research and development Ulrich Hackenberg and Porsche’s engine chief Wolfgang Hatz are both out — two of the top engineering figures in the Volkswagen’s other flagship brands. That comes as a bit of a surprise, even though it’s widely expected more heads will roll at VW aside from Martin Winterkorn, the CEO of the company’s worldwide operations, who resigned effective yesterday.

Nvidia launches overclock-friendly GTX 980 desktop GPU for gaming laptops

Earlier this month, we covered Asus’insane water-cooled laptop and the appearance of a new Nvidia GPU that looked for all the world like a GTX 980 desktop chip in a mobile form factor. Today, Nvidia is taking the lid off that particular project — and it’s even crazier than we thought it was. Putting a GTX 980 in a notebook chassis is a bit nuts, even if these systems are only portable in the same way that a five-gallon bucket is portable.

Amid emissions scandal, Volkswagen may have mortally wounded the diesel passenger car market

This morning there’s more fallout from the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal, as VW has now admitted 11 million vehicles globally may have the defeat software installed that lets the company cheat on its emissions tests. At least in the US, there are approximately 500,000 TDI-branded cars on the roads that are routinely spewing out up to 40 times the legal amount of NOx, which leads to increased air pollution in the form of smog, respiratory problems in humans, and the destruction of the ozone layer. In the meantime, VW has issued a stop-sale order on all new and used TDIs, and the Justice Department has opened a criminal probe.

Quantum dots, OLED go head-to-head in 65-inch DisplayMate shootout

Normally, when we cover head-to-head display competitions, it’s between smartphones or tablets, with the occasional dip into laptop comparisons. Today, we’ve got something different in store — a 65-inch LG OLED 4K panel going up against a 65-inch Samsung LCD with quantum dot technology. Miraculously, the two panels aren’t ridiculously far apart in price — while the OLED 65-inch panel is still a hefty $1000 more expensive than its Samsung rival, we’re comparing a $5000 Samsung UN65JS9500 model against a $6000 LG 65EG9600. That’s progress, even if it’s been more than a decade since OLED televisions were first forecast to be right around the corner.

Office 2016 review: Microsoft makes mobile-first, cloud-first a reality

If you simply install Office 2016 on a single desktop, you could be excused for wondering what Microsoft has been doing for the last three years. Other than a bit of a facelift, and some admittedly welcome added features that we first reviewed in the Preview version (and won’t re-hash here), for the most part it looks and acts like Office 2013. The minute you start to share or work with others, though, the major changes in the way the Office system works begin to appear.

Cloud-first is more than just defaulting to OneDrive

Microsoft has started using OneDrive as the default storage location for an increasing number of its applications, but that is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the integration of the cloud — and team-based workflows — in Office 2016. The new version features brand new team-only apps Planner and Delve, as well as Sway, an innovative new presentation creation and sharing application. Real-time collaboration has also been added to Word, OneNote, and PowerPoint. For organizations that have standardized on Office, there is plenty to like in its newest incarnation.

Office 365 Planner & Delve

Office 2016 introduces two entirely new applications to support teams. Delve has been out in preview form for a while. Available to organizations with Office 365 business subscriptions, it uses the power of Microsoft’s servers to allow users to get an automated view into what is likely to be important to them. It does this by using data from Office Graph — essentially a complete record of every document, meeting, or email-related action taken by every user — to build a tiled dashboard of people, projects, and documents that are related to what you’ve been working on, or that have been shared with you.

Planner is a brand new tool that allows teams to quickly set up projects and populate them with tasks and documents. Like Delve, it then uses Office Graph to create user-specific, interactive dashboards of project status. It isn’t designed to replace the heavy-lifting style of project management done by Microsoft Project. But for busy team members, it’s a quick way to keep track of their involvement in many different projects. While Delve provides a people-focused dashboard of all Office-related activity, Planner provides one based on projects and tasks.

In functionality, Planner is very similar to some other existing services, such as Trello, but because it has the advantage of being deeply integrated with Office Graph, it may become the favorite among those organizations committed to Office. On the flip side, for organizations that don’t have a corporate commitment to hosted or server-based Office installations, a separate service allows more flexibility.

Office Sway

For individual users, the most exciting new capability is probably Sway. Sway allows users to easily construct catchy multimedia presentations. Unlike PowerPoint, it doesn’t rely on a slide-by-slide metaphor, and also moves much of the responsibility for layout style to the application. Users can tweak the layout themselves, or use the Remix! Button to have Sway cycle through suggestions. Although part of Office 2016, the Sway application is available from the Windows 10 app store, and for the iPhone and iPad. It is also part of Office Online.

Sway presentations are easy-to-create, colorful, and look cool. It is so easy to make them appear catchy, that I think we’ll see a lot of users go overboard — the same way people went crazy with typefaces when desktop publishing was introduced. It can be very disconcerting to be looking at a Sway presentation and having fly-in effects and panning images while you’re trying to read.

Once shared, a Sway can be viewed by anyone with a browser, although Sway presentations are always hosted on Microsoft’s sway.com, and can’t be off-lined or exported to another format. That raises another issue — longevity. Microsoft doesn’t have the best track record for long-term commitment to its creative tools (remember Expression, Movie Maker, or Live Writer?). Until there is a way to guarantee the long-term survival of a Sway, I see it being most effective for quick sharing.

Real-time collaboration in Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote

Not to be outdone by the rising tide of cloud-based document editors like Google Docs, Microsoft has added some very slick real-time collaboration capabilities to Word, and similar versions to PowerPoint and OneNote. On the editing front, not only can two users edit the same cloud-hosted document, but if it is on Microsoft’s servers (OneDrive or Office 365, for example) then they can each see exactly where other users are in the document.

Microsoft adds to this capability by making it easy to open a Skype call (or chat or meeting) with any of the document’s authors from right within Word.

Office mobile apps

While not news — as they’ve been around for a while already — Microsoft’s mobile apps for Office have been the most rapidly evolving part of the Office. These touch-friendly versions of Word, Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint run on iOS, Android, and of course Windows 10. For Windows 10 users on tablets or phones, the mobile versions of the applications make it much easier to work without a keyboard or mouse. Microsoft also has some additional cool tools for mobile users, including my favorite mobile document scanning applications: Office Lens.

Office 365 (2016) pricing: Subscriptions get more attractive

Microsoft has clearly realized — like Adobe before it — that getting people to pay nearly any amount per month, forever, is better than relying on the whims of upgraders. So it is offering both a discounted Personal Plan ($7/month for 1 machine and 1 phone), and a more value-oriented Home Plan ($10/month for 5 computers and 5 phones). Both plans include 1TB of OneDrive storage and 60 Skype calling minutes per month — meaning you get Office essentially for free compared to a similarly-sized cloud plan from Google, for example. (You can compare plans in more detail at the Microsoft Office 3650 Home subscription page). Both plans include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access.

Those preferring to stick with the traditional purchase licensing model can get Office 2016 (one-time purchase without upgrades) Home and Business for $230. It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. The Student and Teacher version is $150, but doesn’t include Outlook. Purchased versions don’t include the Skype minutes, and only feature 15GB of free storage.

Mobile-first, cloud-first: Does Microsoft have it right?

Whether you use Ballmer’s phrase “devices and services” or Nadella’s “mobile-first, cloud-first,” it represents the largest software pivot for Microsoft since its 1990s embrace of the web. It implies expanding its platform presence from just Windows to online and mobile, and its moving its revenue model from product licensing to cloud-based service subscriptions. Office 2016 represents Microsoft’s most aggressive effort to date to make these major changes. Its services are available across most platforms, and its revenue is increasingly platform neutral — since it gets subscription revenue independent of which platform you use to access the services.

Google has been selling a very similar vision with its Google Apps for Work offering, but Microsoft is bringing the world’s most mature suite of productivity applications to the party. The good news for organizations, especially those that are long-time Office customers, is that they no longer have to choose between the power of Office and the flexibility of the cloud. With Office 2016 combined with Office 365, Microsoft is giving them the opportunity to have both.

Why is Konami making gambling machines and mobile games instead of AAA games?

From a public relations standpoint, this past year has been incredibly rough for Konami. We’ve seen a falling out with its biggest creative resource, the complete removal of any trace of P.T. from the PSN store, and reports of excessively harsh treatment of employees. Now, it seems that Konami is exiting the world of console game development with the single exception of the Pro Evolution Soccer series. Considering that Konami holds the rights to some of the most beloved franchises in gaming history, this is incredibly sad news.

Apple supposedly working on an electric car with a 2019 launch date

It sounds a little like someone’s idea of a joke. Apple is supposedly working on bringing an electric car to market, despite its lack of experience in the field or any previous automotive operation. Nonetheless, it’s been reported that Apple has a skunkworks of some 600 employees looking to bring a vehicle to market by 2019. The concept, dubbed Project Titan, has reportedly been studied for years, but Apple recently decided to triple the size of its team and bring on an additional 1200 people. Since no photos or finished product is available, we’ve decided to bring you the best of the mockups and concepts the Internet has to offer. You can thank us later.

LG competition offers chance to win 34-inch widescreen displays, $10,000 for a dream PC

Ten semi-finalists will take home an LG 34UC87C, so let’s talk about that for a moment.LG recently launched its new 34-inch 21:9 widescreen monitor. As part of that effort, the company is offering PC enthusiasts the chance to win a display or even build an entire dream machine. Upload a video or still images that describe your current setup and describe the dream machine you want to build, and you may get lucky. If your entry is chosen, LG will hook you up with a design team including Linus of Linus Tech Tips, Lewis from UnboxTherapy, or gaming expert Jahova.

The iOS App Store has been hit with its first major malware scare

Malware authors have been targeting Android for years with all manner of nasty tricks, but we’re only now seeing the first large scale attack on Apple’s walled iOS garden. Researchers at Palo Alto Networks have uncovered a hive of iOS malware nestled within the very thing that was supposed to keep users safe — the App Store. Apple has already taken action to remove the threat, but the full effects of the “XcodeGhost” are not yet known.

VW caught cheating on diesel emissions standards, ordered to recall 500,000 cars

There are multiple interesting facets to this situation. When VW brought its clean diesel technology to the US, it hyped up its own use of a urea-based additive, known as AdBlue, as a key component of its exhaust-cleaning system. Because US regulations on nitrous oxide emissions are even more strict than European laws, VW claimed it could bring NOx emissions down to as low as 70mg/mile, in compliance with California’s “Tier 2 / Bin 5″ emission standard. (New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine also use this standard).Diesel cars have never been popular in the US, after disastrous early introductions left the American market with a poor impression of the fuel and the commercial vehicles that use it. VW is one of a handful of companies to introduce vehicles based on so-called “clean diesel” technology in the last decade, and claimed that the era of smoking, high-pollution diesel was over. Sounds great in theory — but the entire premise may have been built on false assumptions. On Friday, the EPA slammed Volkswagen with a massive, 500,000-car recall, noting that the manufacturer had designed its vehicles to deliberately hide their own diesel emissions and that the cars can dump up to 40x more pollution into the atmosphere than legally allowed.

Terahertz breakthrough allows for ultrafast wireless communications

Oscillating at around 1 trillion times per second, THz waves were previously utilized for the wireless data transmission world record, whereby a team of researchers showed local data transmission could be up to 100GBit/s. However, for any real world system, electronic components are required which perform common functions akin to our regular communication technology; such as transmission, multiplexing, demultiplexing, detection, processing etc.A collaboration between US and Japanese researchers, have developed a key component in order to enable wireless communications which operate up to 100x faster than current generation routers. Current wireless communications operate at microwave frequencies, however as the demand for faster speeds and larger bandwidths increases, scientists are looking for ways to alleviate the communication bottleneck. Between the microwave and infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum lies an appealing candidate: Terahertz (THz) radiation.

Sharp will launch 8K TVs next month, at six-digit prices

2015 was the first year that 4K TVs and monitors began to gain serious traction, but that’s not stopping businesses at the top. Sharp has announced that it will launch 8K displays by the end of October, with its first 85-inch displays selling for roughly $125,000 apiece. These panels aren’t headed for the mainstream consumer market, however — instead, they’ll be snapped up by public broadcasters like NHK, which plans to test its first 8K broadcasts next year and wants to have regular services ready for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

5 Scientific Reasons Body Swapping Might Be Possible

I've spent my whole life fleeing from the consequences of my actions. Whether by treachery, cunning, or daring biplane escape, there's not a misdeed whose fallout I haven't escaped.

abadonian/iStock/Getty Images
I actually used the biplane to flee the fallout from the expense report I filed for the biplane.

But sometimes, my indiscretions pose resistant to most conventional forms of flight. And with the authorities closing in on me, my mind has often turned to the possibility of swapping my body with that of some poor rube, and escaping that way. My schemes along this angle have never gotten much further than causing head injuries during a lightning storm, but during a recent spell of non-villainy, I had the time to sit down and do some proper research on the subject. Thus was I was happily surprised to discover that there are actual scientists -- wearing the crispest, cleanest of lab coats -- who are working on the same problem. Here, then, for your new-life-starting pleasure, are the five most scientifically promising ways that we might one day be able to swap bodies with some rube.

Making life more resistant to stress

All plants need to photosynthesize to survive. But when you throw in environmental stressors like excess heat, cold, drought, salt, or herbicides, just photosynthesizing can be deadly. Even in the absence of any of these assaults, too much sun can be worse than too little. The fact that chlorophyll’s absorption spectrum makes things surprisingly green reflects the compromises inherent in being able to capture every photon possible when they are scarce, yet field only just enough when they are plentiful.A recent paper in Current Biology suggests that plants can be engineered against climate change, even drought. Researchers propose to do this by making the plants better at handling stress. Now I know what you might be thinking — ‘stress’, ‘climate change’ — it sounds like it’s time to call the plant acupuncturist. However, there is actually some fascinating new science hiding behind claims like this.

Rock Paper Scissors robot wins 100% of the time

First, how the robot won: by watching. There were three strategies that could produce a 100% win record, but they all basically boil down to using a high-speed camera and human-beating electronic reflexes to identify the oncoming shape of the opponent’s hand and play the corresponding move to beat it. Just the angle of the wrist or early movement of the fingers is enough to give away what move the human is headed for.The newest version of a robot from Japanese researchers can not only challenge the best human players in a game of Rock Paper Scissors, but it can beat them — 100% of the time. In reality, the robot uses a sophisticated form a cheating which both breaks the game itself (the robot didn’t “win” by the actual rules of the game) and shows the amazing potential of the human-machine interfaces of tomorrow.

Jim Keller, AMD’s chief CPU architect, leaves the company

Earlier this week, we reported on rumors that AMD’s Zen might have slipped into Q4 2016. Since then, we’ve heardthe chip could actually launch in the Q1 2017 timeframe — and now, there’s further reason to think that something happened to AMD’s next-generation CPU timetable. Now, it’s been reported that Jim Keller, who returned to AMD to helm its new CPU after a stint with Apple, has left the company to “pursue other opportunities.”

Hackers have created master keys to TSA-approved locks, and the TSA couldn’t care less

First, some background. In 2003, Travel Sentry introduced a new type of TSA-approved lock with a built-in backdoor. A TSA agent armed with the appropriate tools could open the lock, inspect the item, and then send the luggage on its way. The entire system was meant to ensure that officials could still search luggage without forcing consumers to give up all of their security in the process.For years, the US TSA (that’s the Transportation Security Agency, a division of Homeland Security) has recommended that travelers in the United States buy and equip their luggage with a TSA-approved lock. The ostensible reason for this is because it allows the agency immediate access to your bag in the event that it needs to inspect your luggage rather than requiring agents to cut the lock physically in order to inspect its contents. Now, a team of hackers have demonstrated that the seven master keys that collectively open every TSA-approved lock ever manufactured have been broken.

IBM’s upcoming blockchain release could change the internet

A blockchain is just a database with special provisions built in to make it public and agreed-upon by all users — and that transparency is what makes tampering with the blockchain easy to detect. With a trusted, mutually visible place to store basic information, it’s possible to do things like send money over the internet; there’s no need to worry about fraud when the whole transaction is controlled by the info in the blockchain, which is available for you to review at any time. This has taken the form of blockchain-based securities trading, which speeds up the process from days to minutes, while bringing risks down to “zero.”IBM has announced that it will soon  release its own, open source version of blockchain software — the public ledger system that lets Bitcoin work. It’s not a move to reinvent cryptocurrency, but an ambitious attempt to allow individuals and large corporations alike to make full use of everything the internet makes possible. It has the potential to decentralize the internet, making it both safer and more versatile in one fell swoop.

NASA delays crewed Orion capsule launch two years, to 2023

This new delay, however, means the Space Launch System (SLS) will now spend nearly five years from its first Exploration Mission (EM-1) launch in 2018 to the second launch in 2023. The 2018 mission will send the Orion capsule on a circumlunar trajectory with a splashdown back on Earth seven days later. NASA and Lockheed have collaborated on the design of EM-1 and the Orion capsule; NASA announced it would lighten by up to 25% by making multiple changes to Orion’s panel configurations and reducing the number of welds. The Orion vehicle has held up well in its various tests to-date, including a successful uncrewed test flight last December and a demonstrated ability to land despite the failure of two parachutes.NASA has announced that it will delay the launch of its crewed Orion space capsule to April 2023, almost two years later than the original target of August, 2021. The organization claims that this latest day is the result of a rigorous technical review program that incorporates numerous changes to the original EM-2 capsule design. According to Bill Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for human exploration at NASA, these changes should improve the flight characteristics of the vehicle. “We did some changes to reduce weight, took a lot of weight out of the structure for EM-1 and EM-2, [and] reduced the number of cone panels that make up the cone section of the Orion,” Gerstenmaier said.