Google has been gut-punched by the European Commission for abusing its search monopoly to squeeze out other players on the Web. Europe's competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, had been expected to hit Google with a fine of around €1 billion, but the actual number is far larger: €2.42 billion, the largest anti-monopoly fine ever issued.
In addition to the fine, Google will be required to change its search algorithm so that every competing service is fairly crawled, indexed, ranked, and displayed. If Google fails to remedy its anti-competitive conduct within 90 days it will face daily penalty payments of up to 5 percent of the daily worldwide turnover of Google's parent company Alphabet. The commission's full statement on the decision makes for quite damning reading.
Google, as reported by the AFP news agency, "respectfully disagrees" with the EU's fine and is considering an appeal. We have asked Google for comment and will update this story when it responds.
Just so you know...yes, I know the phrase "Choose your fighter!" is from Mortal Kombat and not Street Fighter. It was just that "Player Select" was a less impactful title.
Life on Earth may have started with a bang. (credit: Don Davis/NASA)
There aren't a lot of individual experiments that have ended up being staples of high school textbooks, but Stanley Miller and Harold Urey did one of them. Miller and Urey are the people who sealed up a mixture of gases meant to model the Earth's early atmosphere and jolted the gas with some sparks. What emerged was a complex mix of chemicals that included amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
It was a seminal experiment in that it gave researchers one of the first avenues to approach the origin of life experimentally, but its relevance to the actual origin of life has faded as the research it inspired began to refine our ideas. A French-Czech team of researchers decided to give it another look, using a source of energy that Miller and Urey hadn't considered: the impact of a body arriving from space. The result? The production of all four of the bases found in RNA, a close chemical cousin to DNA and equally essential to life.
Conceptual shifts
There are two reasons that the Miller-Urey experiment gradually fell out of favor. The first is conceptual. At the time, people focused on life's dizzying web of chemical reactions, almost all of which are catalyzed by proteins, so it was hard to envision life without proteins. The formation of amino acids could enable the formation of proteins and thus seemed to provide an obvious route to a primitive biochemistry. Genetic material could be added later.
Years in the making, a proposal to mandate the installation of fiber conduits during federally funded highway projects might be gaining some new momentum.
If the US adopts a "dig once" policy, construction workers would install conduits just about any time they build new roads and sidewalks or upgrade existing ones. These conduits are plastic pipes that can house fiber cables. The conduits might be empty when installed, but their presence makes it a lot cheaper and easier to install fiber later, after the road construction is finished.
The idea is an old one. US Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) has been proposing dig once legislation since 2009, and it has widespread support from broadband-focused consumer advocacy groups. It has never made it all the way through Congress, but it has bipartisan backing from lawmakers who often disagree on the most controversial broadband policy questions, such as net neutrality and municipal broadband. It even got a boost from Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who has frequently clashed with Democrats and consumer advocacy groups over broadband—her "Internet Freedom Act" would wipe out the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules, and she supports state laws that restrict growth of municipal broadband.
Stop reading now, if you still want to guess and not have the answers spoiled for you.
Stop reading now, if you still want to guess and not have the answers spoiled for you.
Just so you know...yes, I know the phrase "Choose your fighter!" is from Mortal Kombat and not Street Fighter. It was just that "Player Select" was a less impactful title.
