Andrew

For decades, Mazda had been known as the sole remaining automaker producing cars powered by rotary engines — that is, until the RX-8 left the market in 2012. But at this year's Tokyo Motor Show, the company announced plans to bring the rotary engine back to life, and these are the lines along which it's thinking: meet the beautiful RX-Vision.

Mazda isn't saying much about what'll go under the hood of this swooping, graceful addition to the classic RX series, but the revival of the rotary engine alone will be enough to excite many. Although rotary engines present serious technical challenges when it comes to meeting fuel efficiency targets and emissions guidelines, they're known for cramming immense power inside a compact, lightweight...

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The Librarian of Congress has issued new exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as part of a triennial review, and one of them grants people access to parts of the computer software running their cars. While you've always been allowed to tinker with your car's engine or change the oil and rotate the tires, now you'll be able to get under the digital hood.

The DMCA was passed in 1998 to protect things like copyrighted software, usually by prohibiting the copying or modification of it, or at least the bypassing of encryption that protects it. But every three years, groups can propose exceptions to these rules. For this year's review, the Electronic Frontier Foundation proposed an exemption that would allow people to...

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Want to know how to capture a wacky portrait of your cat? Shoot a photo while they’re shaking themselves clean (or dry). That’s what photographer Carli Davidson did for her new project titled Shake Cats.

Davidson is a 34-year-old Portland-based animal rights activist who found most of her subjects from local animal rescues. After shooting a nice head shot of each cat for the shelter website — which helped them get adopted almost immediately — Davidson gave the cats a grooming session with nail trimmings and ear cleanings, after which the cats would usually shake themselves. If that didn’t do the trick, a few drops of water usually would.

The resulting portraits are wonderfully bizarre-looking:

Davidson has shot nearly 100 cats so far for the Shake Cats project. She’s publishing around 140 of them in a new book that’s coming out on October 27th, 2015.

The photographer is known for her previous projects in this Shake series, which started with adult dogs and then moved on to little puppies. Here’s a behind-the-scenes interview with Davidson that we shared back in 2013.

Image credits: Photographs by Carli Davidson and used with permission

Flatulence is perfectly natural, but when it happens in public, you’d do anything to avoid the embarrassment . Whether they’re silent and deadly or loud and proud, here are the most dastardly ways to pass gas around others and slip away like a fart ninja.

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George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a classic book that describes a rather dystopian future with surveillance and control as central themes.

The author himself passed away in 1950 and currently his rights are controlled and protected by the Orwell estate.

Ironically, the estate itself has gained a reputation for exerting tight control of copyrights and trademarks, surveilling the Internet for possible offenses.

This is something Internet radio host Josh Hadley has now experienced first hand. Hadley runs 1201 Beyond where he gathers and distributes his shows and writings, among other things.

Before he had his own site and store Hadley used CafePress to sell T-shirts. Although he never sold any, the old store didn’t go unnoticed by the Orwell estate.

Last week he received a worrying email from CafePress informing him that one of his designs had been taken offline due to an alleged copyright violation. The design in question, as seen below, mentions the number sequence “1984.”

According to the complaint the T-shirt design uses “George Orwell quotes,” but the only reference to the author are the numbers that make up the book’s title.

This appears to be a rather broad request, not least since copyright law does not protect book titles.

Hadley is offended by the request which he believes to be illegitimate and something George Orwell himself would not support.

“First off is the irony of the estate of George Orwell being all Orwellian but second is that you can’t copyright a number,” he tells TF.

“The US Copyright office has long since established this and second they are claiming I am using ‘quotes’ from the book. Look at the image in question and tell me what ‘quotes’ I used.”

CafePress has pulled the designs offline and they are now listed as “pending” in Hadley’s dashboard. In theory, he could appeal the takedown but he has no plans to do so.

The Orwell estate maintains that the use of the image violates their rights, according to its literary executor Bill Hamilton who we showed the contested design.

“The estate has never licensed merchandising, nor have the licensees of the relevant film rights, under which merchandising usually comes. Some of the merchandising I asked to be taken down was in clear breach of copyright,” Hamilton tells TF.

Appreciating the irony of the whole situation, Hadley says he will reissue the T-shirt in his new store and won’t take any further abuse from the Orwell heirs.

“This is blatant abuse of the copyright system and more off it’s a ridiculous attempt to control something that needs no control.”

“I am in the process of having this image retouched and added to the store on my current site as I will not allow this kind of abuse of authority to stand.”

Hadley is warned though, Big Brother is watching…

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

I built a simple brochure website for a business-to-business client. They approved the final version on the test server, so I asked for the FTP password to move it into place. They refused, citing security concerns. I argued that a web developer is a bit like a car mechanic: you have to trust them with the keys to your car. No go. So I sent them the entire website as a .zip file. They could not figure out how to upload it, so they gave in and emailed me.

The FTP password for this security-conscious company turned out to be 12345678.

J.K. Rowling has revealed more details about Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a two-part play that will open in London's West End next year. The first official theatrical adaptation of the Harry Potter story is set 19 years after the book's main timeline finishes and will focus on the challenges of the Potter family.

Here's the official synopsis:

It was always difficult being Harry Potter and it isn’t much easier now that he is an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband and father of three school-age children.

While Harry grapples with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs, his youngest son Albus must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted. As past and present fuse ominously, both father...

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Every year, there’s a competition held in Petaluma, California, to discover and crown the ugliest dog in the world. Petaluma-based photographer Ramin Rahimian attended the World’s Ugliest Dog Contest this year and shot portraits of the 27 dogs as they flaunted their hairlessness, strange hairdos, crazy eyes, strange expressions, and floppy tongues.

Rahimian set up a black backdrop and some studio lighting near the show stage and invited the owners to have their dogs pose for beauty (or… ugly?) shots.

“Despite the lighting, I find humor in the portraits,” Rahimian tells PetaPixel. “They are of slightly off moments and a little quirky. I would say that those are the type of portraits I am attracted to and try to make.”

The winner of this year’s contest (and the $1,500 grand prize) was Quasi Modo, a dog born with a short spine that makes him look like a hyena. He “epitomized excellence in ugliness,” writes Chief Judge Brian Sobel.

Here are some of the other dogs that competed in this year’s contest:

Boolah

Bubbers

Frodo

Grovie

Icky

Isaboo

Molly

Rascal Deux

Scamp

Sweepee Rambo

Zoomer

“This was a personal project I took on in my own town,” Rahimian says. “Being a work-from-home dad leaves me, unfortunately, with little time to come up with doable self-assigned photo projects.”

“I had always heard about the contest and knew that one day I would shoot it in some form. I researched images taken at the contest from past years, and I felt I could do some nice portraits of the dogs and really focus on their ugly (beautiful) faces.”

You can find more of Rahimian’s work on his website.

Image credits: Photographs by Ramin Rahimian and used with permission

I received an interesting call just right before I was to leave on vacation, from a client with a website we’d recently completed. The client’s site, which promoted a popular restaurant, had even just recently won an award for its design and generated a lot of traffic. 

Client: Hey! How’s it going? I just wanted to tell you that while I realize was time to renew our year at the hosting company - I called and cancelled it instead.

Me:   …What?

Client: Yeah! Since you told us Wordpress is free - I saw no point in paying that yearly fee to them anymore.

Me: How long ago did you DO this?

Client: Oh, about two weeks ago. But now I can’t find my website online.

I started searching for the site frantically. It was gone. 

Client: Can you make sure it’s up and running correctly? We have a big brunch event coming up we need to take reservations for. 

Thankfully, the hosting company found this story to be SO hilarious, they went back and restored the database and account free of charge, even though it had been closed down two weeks prior. I couldn’t have been more grateful for them not immediately cleaning up the server.

FUN card X-ray analysis. (1) External memory (AT24C64); (2) Microcontroller (AT90S8515A); (3) Connection wires; (4) Connection grid. (credit: Houda Ferradi, Rémi Géraud, David Naccache, and Assia Tria)

"Forgery X-ray analysis. (5) Stolen card’s module; (6) Connection wires added by the fraudster; (7) Weldings by the fraudster (only three are pointed out here)." (credit: Houda Ferradi, Rémi Géraud, David Naccache, and Assia Tria)

Four years ago, about a dozen credit cards equipped with chip-and-PIN technology were stolen in France. In May 2011, a banking group noticed that those stolen cards were being used in Belgium, something that should have been impossible without the card holders inputting their PINs. That’s when the police got involved.

The police obtained the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) numbers present at the locations where the cards were used and at the times they were used, and then they correlated those IMSI numbers to SIM cards.

Using that information, the police were able to arrest a 25-year-old woman carrying a large number of cigarette packs and scratchers, which were apparently intended for resale on the black market. After her arrest, four more members of the fraud ring were identified and arrested. That number included the engineer who was able to put together the chip card hacking scheme that a group of French researchers call "the most sophisticated smart card fraud encountered to date.”

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Disney released the official final poster for Star Wars: The Force Awakens over the weekend, and I've spent every minute since trying to parse why the art feels so insulting to my fandom. I thought I had it, for a moment. The poster isn't designed by Drew Struzan, the artist responsible for the iconic prequel posters. That's a shame, but no, that's not the problem.

It took a design expert to catch the small narratological discrepancy. As Olly Gibbs noted on Twitter, the poster is void of the Star Wars universe's most essential character: Jar Jar Binks. For those unfamiliar with the franchise, Binks is like the Paul McCartney of the Rebel Alliance. (Yoda is Lennon, Chewbacca is Harrison, and Luke is Ringo.) A Star Wars poster without a...

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Rich Clarkson’s photo of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then named Lew Alcindor, in the 1968 NCAA Men’s National Basketball Final Four semifinal game in Los Angeles is a masterpiece of composition, timing and exposure. The square format is the result of shooting the game action with a Hasselblad – a practice that continued into the early 2000s. But that isn’t what makes this photo historically interesting.

Rich Clarkson’s 1968 photo of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The blue haze that adds such a wonderful ambience to the arena is caused by cigarette smoke. The California Indoor Clean Air Act of 1976 was one of many regulations that started to clamp down on public smoking, and thus, we traded better light for better health. The same blue haze is evident in many historical boxing photos, like the ones made by Neil Leifer.

In 2006, then owner of the Los Angeles Lakers, Dr. Jerry Buss, pined for a more nostalgic look in the Staples Center. Thus, the lighting was focused onto the court with very little spill onto the arena seats. USA Today’s Robert Hanashiro captured the scene inside Staples center.

Mar 26, 2015; Los Angeles, CA, USA; North Carolina Tar Heels guard Joel Berry II (2) grabs a rebound against Wisconsin Badgers forward Frank Kaminsky (44) during the first half in the semifinals of the west regional of the 2015 NCAA Tournament at Staples Center. Robert Hanashiro/USA TODAY Sports

And a similar scene inside UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion.

Jan 11, 2015; Los Angeles, CA, USA; UCLA Bruins guard Norman Powell (4) drives to the hoop between California Golden Bears guard Sam Singer (2) and Golden Bears forward David Kravish (45) during the second half at Pauley Pavilion. Robert Hanashiro/USA TODAY Sports

The look is more dramatic than a fully illuminated areana, but certainly still lacks the panache of the smoke-filled past.

About the author: Allen Murabayashi is the Chairman and co-founder of PhotoShelter, which regularly publishes resources for photographers. Allen is a graduate of Yale University, and flosses daily. This article was also published here.

Enlarge (credit: http://habrahabr.ru/post/268421/)

USB sticks have long been a mechanism for delivering malware to unsuspecting computer users. A booby-trapped flash drive, for instance, was the means by which the US and Israel reportedly infected Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility with the Stuxnet worm. And, in case anyone thought USB stick attacks had lost their novelty, last year's Bad USB proof-of-concept exploit delivered a highly programmable attack platform that can't be detected by today's defenses.

Now, a researcher who goes by the name Dark Purple has created a USB device that can permanently destroy much of a computer's innards, rendering the machine little more than an expensive doorstop. Within seconds of being plugged in, the USB stick delivers a negative 220-volt electric surge into the USB port. As the video below demonstrates, that's enough to permanently damage the IBM Thinkpad receiving the charge.

As viewers can see, the USB stick looks normal, and there are no outward signs it's malicious. But the USB Killer 2.0, as its creator calls it, takes computer attacks on a less-traveled road that leads to physical destruction. According to this post from The Daily Mail, an earlier and less powerful version of the device drew power from USB ports using a DC-to-DC converter until it reached negative 100 volts. At that point, the power was directed into the computer. The process ran on a loop until the circuitry failed. It's likely Version 2 works similarly.

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Many people move to affordable retiree-friendly places like Las Vegas and Florida when they stop working, but what if you want to stay in the big city? Smart Asset calculated how much you should have in savings for the most and least affordable cities in the US.

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The fact that this walker isn't walking is nothing short of miraculous.

The death of a stormtrooper is a production. It's a common one, what with their plastic armor being about as good at stopping lasers as plastic dinnerware. But each passing is commemorated with a shower of sparks and a Wilhelm scream. It's an exit that feels more staged than gruesome, and Star Wars: Battlefront captures this micro-drama and more brilliantly in its open beta.

So far, though, it's mostly the do-gooder Rebel Alliance that does the dying. That's mostly thanks to "Walker Assault," one of three scenarios currently available to beta players. It's the showpiece of the lot, keeping in the tradition of countless Hoth missions in countless Star Wars games before this one. Rebel allies and Imperial stormtroopers vie for control in a very non-canonical version of The Empire Strikes Back's snowbound encounter.

But the conflict is decidedly asymmetrical. The Empire only needs to run out the clock while their iconic AT-AT walkers plow through the Alliance's all-important shield generator. The Rebels, on the other hand, play a very different game, where a very difficult mix of coordination and timing are key to success.

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House Republicans need a speaker. Their current speaker is quitting. The obvious next choice just dropped out of the race. The other obvious choice is telling anyone who'll listen that he won't run. And a bipartisan speaker just isn't going to happen.

House Republicans need Mitt Romney.

"I'm on my way" pic.twitter.com/sibIoslutO

— Drew (@FigDrewton) October 8, 2015

I'll admit it: When I first proposed this to my colleagues it was just a joke. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. And apparently it's an idea that House Republicans are already taking about!

SPEAKER ROMNEY?: now have enough sources to report there is real, serious (tho still limited) talk about it. (!) #tcot #p2

— Lisa Desjardins (@LisaDNews) October 8, 2015

So here's a case I didn't imagine I'd be making when I woke up on Wednesday; here's the case for Speaker Romney.

House Republicans have already endorsed him. Virtually every sitting House Republican endorsed Romney for president in 2012. They were willing to make Romney not just the leader of their party, but the leader of the country. If you can trust a man with nuclear weapons, you can probably trust him to manage floor debate.

Romney is good at building the kind of coalitions House Republicans need. Romney, remember, was the first Republican to win the party's presidential nomination after the rise of the Tea Party. The GOP was exceptionally fractured at that point, and Romney — who came from Massachusetts, had long identified as a moderate Republican, and had passed the precursor to Obamacare — still managed to win the nomination. That was an almost remarkable feat, and it's a skill set the House Republicans badly need.

Mitt Romney is very, very good at raising money. And raising money is a very big part of the speaker's job. John Boehner told Politico he spends between 180 and 190 nights on the road each year begging rich people to hand him their money. The speaker, Boehner said, needs to make sure Republicans "have the resources necessary to win."

But Boehner is an amateur fundraiser compared with Romney, who raised almost $400 million for his 2012 bid (and that doesn't include the hundreds of millions given to his allied Super PACs). With Romney in the speaker's chair, House Republicans would always have the resources necessary to win.

Mitt Romney was a management consultant who specialized in turning around failing organizations. And what are House Republicans right now but a failing organization? I tend to think the transferability of business skills to government is overstated, but, crucially, Republicans don't think that — one of the key arguments for Romney was he had the experience to run government more like a business. And the House Republican Conference needs to be run more like a business and less like a goat rodeo.

Romney is unusually good at both the inside game and the outside game. I argued recently that Boehner's resignation is part of a broader trend in American politics: The outside game is becoming relatively more important compared with the inside game. But Romney is good at both kinds of games.

On the inside game, we have hard evidence of Romney's talents. As Andrew Prokop wrote in his analysis of The Party Decides theory of presidential politics, "Romney's 2012 victory is the only race since 2000 in which ... a party made an early decision and got its way."

The outside game is a bit tougher. While Romney isn't known as the greatest campaigner of all time, the bar for presidential candidates is way, way higher than the bar for congressional leadership. I have heard Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Mitch McConnell give speeches. Trust me, Romney is better at lighting up crowd or giving an interview than they are.

He can give Republicans a national figure able to oppose a Democratic president. Obviously Republicans would like to win in 2016. But they may lose! And they know it. If they lose, then Romney offers them something minority parties rarely have: a figure of national stature able to stand up to the president of the United States. And since Republicans are likely to keep their congressional majority even if a Democrat wins the presidency, it behooves them to have a strong speaker who can translate their control over the most powerful branch of government into public prestige.

He can give House Republicans a national figure able to oppose a Republican president. It's obvious why Republicans will need a strong negotiator if a Democrat wins the presidency. But the same may well be true if a Republican wins the White House. Congressional Republicans, after all, tend to represent safe, conservative districts while the president has a much broader constituency. So whether it's President Bush or Rubio or Trump or Fiorina, House Republicans are going to need a speaker who won't go squishy under presidential pressure. And that will be easier for the speaker has a public profile and a national base of his or her own, as Romney does.

Romney doesn't have a job right now. One of the problems Republicans are having getting candidates to run for speaker is their best prospects already have better jobs; Paul Ryan, for instance, loves being chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. But Romney is an unemployed 68-year-old, and given that he did his best to secure the most challenging job in the country, there's little reason to believe he's really ready for retirement.

So accept it. He's tanned, he's rested, and he's ready. Mitt Romney for speaker!

This simple photo is a fascinating portrait of what smartphone cameras have done to our culture. A single woman is seen enjoying the moment with just her eyes while a sea of smartphone cameras surrounds her.

The photo has been going viral over the past week, and this lady is now an Internet sensation.

After being published by the Boston Globe last week, the photo was spotted and shared on Twitter by developer Wayne Dahlberg:

this is my new favorite photo of all time pic.twitter.com/v8Qs6TeXZf

— Wayne Dahlberg (@waynedahlberg) September 26, 2015

The photo was quickly retweeted over 12,000 times and has since been shared all over the Web. Here’s what people had to say about this “radical” woman:

@timreilly53 @waynedahlberg Radical, huh?

— Bill Weir (@BillWeirCNN) September 26, 2015

@waynedahlberg someone who knows how to be present and enjoy the moment.

— Brent Jensen (@BrentDJensen) September 26, 2015

@waynedahlberg @jabberworks I love her. No cell phone. No camera. No piece of paper and Sharpie pen. Just soaking in the experience.

— Jenn Bower (@JennBower) September 26, 2015

Of course, there were some skeptics as well:

Poor grandma forgot her iPhone. Zoom in for her tears RT @waynedahlberg: this is my new favorite photo of all time pic.twitter.com/S4f4sdayJ4

— Jonas Jansen (@vierzueinser) October 6, 2015

@waynedahlberg @GregBDavies you’ll be so disappointed when you realize she’s wearing Google glass ;)

— Dave Nussbaum (@davenuss79) September 26, 2015

@waynedahlberg pic.twitter.com/joUQEdiUWl

— Tim Collins (@someguyinjuba) September 27, 2015

Image credits: Photo by John Blanding/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Here’s a cute 13-second clip that’s making the rounds on the Web. It shows a little girl throwing a tantrum on a tabletop… until she notices that a camera is being pointed in her direction. If your child has this same reflex, it could be an early indication that you have a future model on your hands.

In celebration of its fifth birthday today, Instagram released a list of its top five accounts for the first time. Taylor Swift (who had previously been confirmed as the photo-sharing app's most popular user) has 49.6 million followers — which comes out to just over 10 percent of Instagram's 400 million global users.

Filling out the top five, the undisputed queen of selfies, Kim Kardashian, has 48.1 million, Beyoncé has 47.2 million, Selena Gomez has 45.9 million, and Ariana Grande has 44.6 million. All five of the top accounts belong to women, and four of those women are pop stars.

These rankings are fairly unsurprising, given that Instagram is often acknowledged as a female-dominated social medium. Instagram's head of global creative...

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For those attending today's Surface Pro / Lumia event, Microsoft is handing out stickers featuring its ninja cat — often seen riding dinosaurs and fire-breathing unicorns — riding internet icon of yesteryear, doge. The pair, of course, is surrounded by comic sans — horrible to the eye, yes, but customary for doge-related internet things.

So what are the big features of Windows 10?

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When Pepsi managed to get its brand of sugar water in 1989's classic Back to the Future II, it surely wasn't anticipating being able to cash in on that product placement more than two decades later. But that's exactly what's happening this month, as the company featured in Marty McFly's fictional 2015 is releasing a real product based on the movie: the Pepsi Perfect bottle. Limited to a release of 6,500 and set to go on sale on October 21st, 2015 — the date to which Marty and Doc Brown traveled forward in time — the Perfect bottles will cost $20.15 each. Using the year to set the price is a nice touch, and even though that's a high price to pay for 16.9 ounces of Pepsi Made with Real Sugar, the collectible value of the thing will likely...

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If you move money around in your accounts frequently, you might’ve been hit with a transaction limit penalty at some point. When this happened to me, I was upset at my bank, but it’s actually the Federal Reserve that limits your savings account to six transactions a month. But why?

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Every so often, a new image format comes to town and attempts to overthrow the established order of how images (and photos) are saved and shared. In 2010, Google announced a new format called WebP, which promised to speed up the Web by shrinking file sizes without hurting quality. Last year, well-known programmer Fabrice Bellard unveiled a format of his own called BPG that claimed to pack the same quality of JPEGs at just half the size.

Now there’s a new contender that raises the bar (and shrinks file size) even more. It’s called FLIF, which stands for Free Lossless Image Format.

On paper, the new format looks impressive. When its compression was compared to other popular formats, it was (on average) 35% smaller than typical PNG files, 37% smaller than lossless JPEG 2000, 15% smaller than lossless WebP, and 22% smaller than lossless BPG.

Features of the format include grayscale/RGB/RGBA, 16-bit color depth, interlaced/non-interlaced, and support for animation.

One of the big advantages of FLIF is that unlike other lossless formats, FLIF works well on any kind of image.

“You are supposed to know that PNG works well for line art, but not for photographs,” the FLIF website says. “For regular photographs where some quality loss is acceptable, JPEG can be used, but for medical images you may want to use lossless JPEG 2000. And so on. It can be tricky for non-technical end-users.”

“FLIF does away with knowing what image format performs the best at any given task […] FLIF beats anything else in all categories.”

Another interesting attribute of FLIF is that it’s lossless and progressive. You only need to download the first part of the file for a reasonable preview of an image. Downloading the rest adds more and more quality to the image. Here’s a video of what a FLIF image looks like as it’s being downloaded slowly (and it’s compared to an Adam7 PNG):

What this means is that FLIF is responsive by design — great for mobile and low-bandwidth uses. If you need a smaller and lower-quality version of a photo, you can simply partially load the file and then resize in the browser.

Finally, FLIF is completely free. It’s released under the GNU General Public License, and is royalty-free and not encumbered by software patents.

In terms of downsides, one thing that isn’t clear yet is how the format’s speed compares to competitors. “Encoding and decoding speeds are not blazingly fast,” the site says, “but they are in the right ballpark.”

Researcher Jon Sneyers, the co-developer of the format, says that FLIF is still a work in progress and that the format hasn’t been finalized yet. Features that are lacking include metadata support, additional color spaces, lossy compression, and web browser support.

If you’d like to find out more about it, you can do so on the official website or by downloading the source code of the format from GitHub.

(via FLIF via Reddit)

As every corner gas station will tell you, breakfast burritos are an awesome way to feed yourself quickly on a busy morning. What the gas station won’t tell you is that you can make your own, better burritos for nearly as cheap as they can.

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The three most active patent trolls in 2014 were all based in East Texas and represented by the same law firm. (credit: Getty Images)

The most prolific patent troll of last year, eDekka LLC, has had its patent wiped out. The ruling (PDF) will shut down 168 lawsuits that eDekka filed based on US Patent No. 6,266,674, according to Texas Lawyer, which first reported the ruling.

The ruling comes from a surprising source: US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap, the East Texas judge who has been criticized for making life extra-difficult for patent defendants. Gilstrap, who hears more patent cases than any other US judge, will eliminate about 10 percent of his entire patent docket by wiping out the eDekka cases.

Gilstrap found that the patent claims "the abstract idea of storing and labeling information" and describes "routine tasks that could be performed by a human." eDekka said its patent claims to "improve the functioning of technology," but Gilstrap ruled the claimed improvements simply weren't present. None of the eDekka claims met the standard for patenting, Gilstrap found.

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The Jefferson Grid is a new Instagram account that’s attracting quite a bit of attention. Each photo posted is a satellite photo of some place in the United States that was discovered using Google Earth. Each photo also shows the area of exactly one square mile.

The New York Times writes that the name of this project refers to the land planning system proposed by Thomas Jefferson over 200 years ago. The young future president was chairman of a planning committee, and he proposed that the US be sliced into plots of square miles for farmers.

“Jefferson’s idea became a reality in 1785 when it was enacted as the Public Land Survey System,” writes the Times. “Today his grid covers much of the country, and it is still used to survey federal lands — an idea that shaped the physical landscape of half a continent.”

The Instagram account is the work of an anonymous photographer. “It’s fascinating that a survey system invented more than 200 years ago still affects the way things are organized and the way people live,” the photographer tells Wired.

He spends time scouring Google Earth for interesting square miles. When he finds a location, he saves a snapshot, touches up the contrast and saturation in Photoshop, and then uploads it to @the.jefferson.grid.

Since starting the project in August, the photographer has already attracted over 15,000 followers with the account.

Here are some more images posted to the account:

Head on over to @the.jefferson.grid on Instagram if you’d like to follow along with this project.

Image credits: Photographs by The Jefferson Grid/Google Earth and used with permission

If karma is real, then it's neatly demonstrated by this video — starring a bear, a kayak, and an increasingly upset woman — from south-east Alaska. "Thank you for leaving my kayak alone," camera operator Mary Maley shouts to a bear roving around outside a US Forest Service cabin in Berg Bay. "I'm going to pepper spray you in the face." The bear, presumably annoyed by the burst of stinking, stinging liquid, turns on its furry heels and decides to set about destroying the thing the unseen Maley apparently loves the most.

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