Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "In 2013, a startup called Outbox drew a lot of attention for its ambitious goal: digitizing everybody's snail mail. It was a nice dream; no more walking down your driveway six days a week to clear out the useless junk it contained. But less than a year later, Outbox shut down. This article explains how the United States Postal Service swiftly crushed their plan to make mail better. The founders were summoned to a meeting with the Postmaster General, who told them. 'We have a misunderstanding. You disrupt my service and we will never work with you. You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren't our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.' The USPS's Chief of Digital Strategy said Outbox's business model 'will never work anyway. Digital is a fad.' The USPS wouldn't work with Outbox to forward customers' mail, and that eventually destroyed the business."

mdsolar (1045926) writes with news that funding for the mPower, a Small Modular [Nuclear] Reactor, has been cut due to the inability to find investors interested in building a prototype. From the article: "The pullback represents a major blow to the development of SMRs, which have been hailed as the next step forward for the nuclear power industry. ... All told, B&W, the DOE, and partners have spent around $400 million on the mPower program. Another $600 million was needed just to get the technology ready for application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for licensing. ... B&W plans to continue low-level R&D on the mPower technology with a view to commercial deployment in the mid-2020s, said CEO James Ferland. But without a major shift in the business environment and in investor perceptions of the risks and rewards associated with nuclear power, that seems fanciful."

samzenpus (5) writes "Last week we told you about a group that was trying to recover the 36-year-old ISEE-3 spacecraft from deep space. Led by CEO and founder of Skycorp, Dennis Wingo, and astrobiologist and editor of NASA Watch, Keith Cowing, the crowdfunded project plans to steer ISEE-3 back into an Earth orbit and return it to scientific operations. Once in orbit, they hope to turn the spacecraft and its instruments over to the public by creating an app that allows anyone access to its data. The team has agreed to take some time from lassoing spacecraft from deep space in order to answer your questions. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post. Hopefully the plan goes better than xkcd predicts."

jfruh (300774) writes "With rumors swirling about Apple entering the wearable space with an iWatch, you'd think that the Japanese and Swiss companies that have dominated high-end watchmaking for more than a century would be scrambling to catch up. But there were virtually no smartwatches on display at the Baselworld trade fair, and the watchmaking giants had no plans to produce any. Company representatives seemed sure that people in practice would be uninterested in constantly recharging their watches and downloading software updates just to tell time."

Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Nicole Arce reports at Tech Times that engineers at Nissan are using a 'super-hydrophobic' and 'oleophobic' paint finish called Ultra-Ever Dry on the new Nissan Note supermini that can repel water and oils, as well as dirt, dust, mud and grit. The paint uses nanotechnology to create a thin air shield above the surface of the car that makes rain, road spray, frost, sleet and standing water roll off the car without tainting its surface at all. 'By creating a protective layer of air between the paint and environment, it effectively stops standing water and road spray from creating dirty marks on the car's surface,' says Nissan's press release. Nissan says it has no plans of making the special paint job a standard on factory models but it will consider offering the self-cleaning paint as an aftermarket option. Nissan is now attempting to determine if the material is durable for long-term use on vehicles — and if it will hold up in different weather conditions around the globe. The Japanese automaker plans to test its custom technology this summer in Europe, with researchers based in its England technical facility using a Versa Note for testing."

skipkent sends this news from Kotaku: "One of the most infamous urban legends in video games has turned out to be true. Digging in Alamogordo, New Mexico today, excavators discovered cartridges for the critically-panned Atari game E.T., buried in a landfill way back in 1983 after Atari couldn't figure out what else to do with their unsold copies. For decades, legend had it that Atari put millions of E.T. cartridges in the ground, though some skeptics have wondered whether such an extraordinary event actually happened. Last year, Alamogordo officials finally approved an excavation of the infamous landfill, and plans kicked into motion two weeks ago, with Microsoft partnering up with a documentary team to dig into the dirt and film the results. Today, it's official. They've found E.T.'s home—though it's unclear whether there are really millions or even thousands of copies down there."

New submitter dislikes_corruption writes: "Stopping the recently announced plan by the FCC to end net neutrality is going to require a significant outcry by the public at large, a public that isn't particularly well versed on the issue or why they should care. Ryan Singel, a former editor at Wired, has written a thorough and easy to understand primer on the FCC's plan, the history behind it, and how it will impact the Internet should it come to pass. It's suitable for your neophyte parent, spouse, or sibling. In the meantime, the FCC has opened a new inbox (openinternet@fcc.gov) for public comments on the decision, there's a petition to sign at whitehouse.gov, and you can (and should) contact your congressmen."

RogueyWon writes: "A recent blog post from Lucasarts had confirmed that the new Star Wars movies planned for release by Disney will formally break continuity with the Expanded Universe novels, comics and video games. They say, 'In order to give maximum creative freedom to the filmmakers and also preserve an element of surprise and discovery for the audience, Star Wars Episodes VII-IX will not tell the same story told in the post-Return of the Jedi Expanded Universe.' The news is unlikely to be a surprise, given George Lucas's previous pronouncements on the issue."

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: "Allen McDuffee reports that DARPA is developing a hybrid-powered motorcycle to soundlessly penetrate remote areas and execute complex, lightning-fast raids. The idea is to develop a hybrid power system that relies on both electric and gas power, allowing special ops to go off-road and zip past enemy forces with the silence of an electric engine, while also being able to handle extended missions and higher speeds with a supplemental gas tank. Logos Technologies plans to fit its quieted, multifuel hybrid-electric power system with an all-electric bike from San Francisco-based manufacturer BRD Motorcycles that uses an existing racing bike, the RedShift MX, a 250-pound all-electric moto that retails for $15,000. The RedShift MX has a two-hour range, but will be extended with a gas tank the size of which will be determined by the military in the research period. The focus on the electric element suggests that DARPA is more concerned with the stealthiness of the motorcycle than it is efficiency."

digitalPhant0m writes: "A story at the L.A. Times details how Verizon Wireless has started pushing the envelope (or downright abusing it) when it comes to tracking users without their knowledge. The company said, 'In addition to the customer information that's currently part of the program, we will soon use an anonymous, unique identifier we create when you register on our websites. This identifier may allow an advertiser to use information they have about your visits to websites from your desktop computer to deliver marketing messages to mobile devices on our network.' While newsworthy, the rate of privacy abuse revelations over the last few years makes it unsurprising."

Today Elon Musk announced that SpaceX has decided to challenge the U.S. Air Force's restrictions on rocket launches related to national security. Such launches are done with a Russian rocket right now, and that contract is not up for competition with other rocket makers, like SpaceX. Musk says the company has exhausted other options to become part of the bidding process. "We're just protesting and saying these launches should be competed. And if we compete and lose, that's fine, but why were they not even competed?" He also said it's the "wrong time to send hundreds of millions of dollars to the Kremlin," referencing events in the Ukraine.

At the same press conference, Musk announced that SpaceX's recent attempt to soft-land a rocket booster stage was successful. It landed and was in "healthy condition" immediately afterward. Unfortunately, they weren't able to recover it because it landed in the middle of a rough storm, which eventually destroyed the stage. The storm was rough enough that the Coast Guard wouldn't even send a boat out to help recover it. Musk said, "We'll get much bigger boats next time." SpaceX also plans on landing the stage on shore at some point, which makes recovery easier. Musk made this prediction: "I expect we will be able to land a stage back at Cape Canaveral by the end of the year."

the_newsbeagle (2532562) writes "Solar power stations in orbit aren't exactly a new idea — Asimov set one of his stories on such a space station back in 1941. Everyone thinks it's a cool idea to collect solar power 24 hours a day and beam it down to Earth. But what with the expense and difficulty of rocketing up the parts and constructing and operating the stations in orbit, nobody's built one yet. While you probably still shouldn't hold your breath, it's interesting to learn that Japan's space agency has spec'd out such a solar power station."

jfruh (300774) writes "Google spent $3.2 billion on Nest. How is it going to make its money back selling high-end electronic thermostats at $250 a pop? Well, keep in mind that Google is a company that makes its money off information, not hardware. In fact, Nest is developing a healthy revenue stream in which it sells aggregated user information to utility companies, to help them more efficiently plan their electricity-generation scheduling. The subscriptions net Google somewhere in the range of $40 per user per year."

alphadogg (971356) writes "Google is considering deploying Wi-Fi networks in towns and cities covered by its Google Fiber high-speed Internet service. The disclosure is made in a document Google is circulating to 34 cities that are the next candidates to receive Google Fiber in 2015. Specific details of the Wi-Fi plan are not included in the document, which was seen by IDG News Service, but Google says it will be 'discussing our Wi-Fi plans and related requirements with your city as we move forward with your city during this planning process.'" And while Google's had some experience running large-scale WiFi, and adding WiFi seems a much lower burden than providing fiber to the home, floating an idea (as AT&T did, to accusations of "smokescreen") is not the same as turning the switch to "On."

JG0LD (2616363) writes "Vic Gundotra, the man behind Google Plus and one of Google's most prominent executives, announced today that he will leave the company 'effective immediately.' Gundotra made the announcement, appropriately enough, in a lengthy Google Plus post, praising his co-workers and saying that he is 'excited about what's next.' However, he did not further outline his future plans, saying that 'this isn't the day to talk about that.'"

mknewman (557587) writes "For years, critics have been taking shots at NASA's plans to corral a near-Earth asteroid before moving on to Mars — and now NASA's chief has a message for those critics: 'Get over it, to be blunt.' NASA Administrator Charles Bolden defended the space agency's 20-year timeline for sending astronauts to the Red Planet on Tuesday, during the opening session of this year's Humans 2 Mars Summit at George Washington University in the nation's capital."

Dega704 (1454673) writes in with news of the latest FCC plan which seems to put another dagger in the heart of net neutrality. "The Federal Communications Commission will propose new rules that allow Internet service providers to offer a faster lane through which to send video and other content to consumers, as long as a content company is willing to pay for it, according to people briefed on the proposals. The proposed rules are a complete turnaround for the F.C.C. on the subject of so-called net neutrality, the principle that Internet users should have equal ability to see any content they choose, and that no content providers should be discriminated against in providing their offerings to consumers."

Bennett Haselton writes: "If you watch a movie or TV show (legally) on your mobile device while away from your home network, it's usually by streaming it on a data plan. This consumes an enormous amount of a scarce resource (data bundled with your cell phone provider's data plan), most of it unnecessarily, since many of those users could have downloaded the movie in advance on their home broadband connection — if it weren't for pointless DRM restrictions." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

T-Mobile may not have great coverage — on our way to the Olympic National Park, my T-Mobile phone stopped working a long time before my friend's Verizon phone did — but I switched two weeks ago because the $80/month plan came with unlimited data, and I thought it would be convenient to watch Netflix streaming content and queued shows on Hulu from anywhere in the city. Since then I've been using data at about 10 times the rate that I did when I was capped at 2GB/month on Verizon.

But there was never any good reason that any of that data had to be downloaded over my data plan at all. I always know in advance what I'm going to be watching on Hulu, and almost always what I'm going to be watching on Netflix, which means if the apps would let me, I would rather download and queue up those movies and shows over my home broadband connection, and then watch the locally saved copies on the go. Hulu and Netflix would make at least the same profit off of me as they do now — I would still be watching Hulu's mandated advertisements before each show, and I would still be paying my monthly Netflix subscription. The difference is that I wouldn't be wasting a limited resource by downloading the content over my data plan. Even if my plan comes with unlimited data, that's not without costs, since one of the reasons I had to upgrade to unlimited data (and give up the broader Verizon coverage in the process) is that I can't download this content in advance at home. Otherwise, Verizon's sub-2GB data cap would have been fine with me.

Unfortunately, Hulu and Netflix apps both make it impossible to save their content locally, presumably due to a misguided attempt at DRM. ("DRM" is often used to refer to static content which has been encrypted in a way to make it difficult to copy; I'm using it more broadly here to include the practice of streaming content in a way which makes it difficult for users to save the content to a local file.)

(It has been pointed out, for example by Timothy Geigner on Techdirt, that data plan bandwidth may not truly be a "scarce resource" at all, and providers impose the data caps just to extract more money from users. The irony, though, is that even if the "scarcity" of cell phone plan data is not real, the streaming of content still constitutes waste of a precious resource, because users waste resources dealing with the data cap — prioritizing which content to download, or figuring out how to download the content illegally at home so they can save it as a local file. Or, they may simply decide to go without having the content on the go because they don't have enough data on their data plan — this counts as a deadweight economic loss caused by the DRM as well.)

You might think that the apps do not allow locally saved copies because the copyright owners prohibit it, but the Google Play app, for example, does allow you to download a saved copy of any content that you have rented or purchased from the Google Play store. (If you "rent" a movie or TV show episode from the Google Play store, you can still save it locally, but some predetermined time after you start watching the content, the content will "expire" and the file will be deleted.) So there is precedent for a non-fly-by-night company allowing you to save a local copy of content that you have paid for the right to access. So why not Hulu and Netflix?

I fear it may be that either the copyright holders, or the lawyers at Hulu and Netflix themselves, have been led to believe that locally saved content is easier to pirate, and neither of them want to be pegged as responsible for enabling piracy. This is fallacious for a couple of reasons: (a) If it's that easy, why hasn't it happened on a large scale with movies from Google Play, which can be saved locally? (b) Streaming content is just as easy to pirate, by, as a last resort, holding up a video camera to a screen playing the movie. (Yes, most users would not bother, but for piracy to occur, only one user in the entire world has to go to the trouble of doing this, and once it's done, an unprotected copy will be freely available on peer-to-peer networks for as long as people have any interest in the movie at all.) Which leads to: (c) Any user technically savvy enough to figure out how to pirate streamed content, is obviously going to be savvy enough to simply download the same content from p2p networks. In other words, forcing users to stream content instead of watching it from locally saved copies, gains the copyright holders and the app makers exactly nothing.

If I had to save content locally in the Hulu app before watching it, of course I'd have to watch ads before the content started playing, just as I do with the streaming version. In that scenario, if I had the time, I could probably try to find a black-market application that would watch the saved content without the ads, but like probably 90% of users, I probably wouldn't bother. And if I did want to make the effort, I'd just BitTorrent a copy of the movie or TV show instead, instead of trying to defeat copy protection on the local saved file.

I have no idea how much data plan bandwidth is used every day on content that users would have preferred downloading at home in advance, but it seems like a non-trivial percentage. Most Hulu and Netflix viewing is of movies or TV shows that you knew in advance you would want to watch, and could have saved. On the other hand, this wouldn't be true of random browsing of YouTube videos in the kind of mindset where you just watch a 60-second clip, feel mildly amused, and watch whatever comes up next in the recommendations bar to the right. Ironically, as you read these words, multiple telecommunications companies are drawing up plans to roll out billions of dollars' worth of communications infrastructure to provide more data services to more users — meanwhile, we could vastly increase the utility of the existing infrastructure with just the flick of a switch. (Well, a couple of switches -- convincing the copyright holders, and the Netflix and Hulu legal departments, that locally saved content is not illegal, as Google Play has shown, and could in fact make them more money. Hulu, after all, is making more money off of me now than the used to, since I'm watching more of their shows on the road, and viewing more of their ads.)

With a static download model, I'm sure the overwhelming majority of Hulu and Netflix users would go on paying (and Hulu would probably actually make more money, from the increased ad views). I would even start the day the same way, before even getting out of bed — by taking the phone on the bedside table, loading up a queued Hulu show, and getting the ad out of the way, then pausing just as the real show begins so that later on I can start watching it immediately. Because it just feels good to start the day with a feeling of accomplishment.

An anonymous reader writes "AT&T officially announced on Tuesday their intention to launch a Netflix-like service in collaboration with an investment group run by a former Fox president. AT&T is following in the footsteps of Verizon, which partnered with Redbox in 2012 to offer the same type of service, and like Verizon, is also still negotiating with Netflix on payments to not throttle Netflix traffic."

alphadogg writes: "Apple is making a billion dollar bet on sapphire as a strategic material for mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad and perhaps an iWatch. Exactly what the company plans to do with the scratch-resistant crystal – and when – is still the subject of debate. Apple is creating its own supply chain devoted to producing and finishing synthetic sapphire crystal in unprecedented quantities. The new Mesa, Arizona plant, in a partnership with sapphire furnace maker GT Advanced Technologies, will make Apple one of the world's largest sapphire producers when it reaches full capacity, probably in late 2014. By doing so, Apple is assured of a very large amount of sapphire and insulates itself from the ups and downs of sapphire material pricing in the global market."