Disney wins duel with fancy dress shop over starwars.co.uk

After owning the domain name starwars.co.uk for the past ten years, a fancy dress retailer in the UK is being forced to relinquish it to Disney. Costumier Jokers’ Masquerade has used the domain to point visitors towards its range of licensed Star Wars outfits, but was asked by Disney to hand it over last year. It refused, so Disney, which acquired Lucasfilm and the rights to Star Wars in 2012, asked UK domain registrar Nominet to step in. Now, following a three-month review, Nominet has ruled that starwars.co.uk, starwars.uk and five other related domains be surrendered.

Speaking to the BBC, the chief exec of Jokers’ Masquerade parent company Abscicca said Disney had “thrown their teddies out of the pram,” mainly because the house that Walt built weren’t able to secure rights to the starwars.uk domain. As part of the launch of .uk addresses last year, Nominet offered owners of .co.uk sites shotgun on the corresponding .uk domain. Naturally, Abscicca jumped at the offer, but Disney’s lawyers reached out soon afterwards. Abscicca tried to strike a deal, agreeing to transfer ownership of the shorter .uk address if it could retain control of starwars.co.uk and another domain.

Disney declined the offer, but it didn’t have to throw too many legal midi-chlorians at the situation. It simply asked Nominet to get involved, and as a spokesperson for the registrar describes it, it was deemed “any user searching for Star Wars and arriving at the respondent’s website will have suffered initial interest, confusion and falsely inferred a commercial connection with the complainant.” Or, in other words, anyone stumbling onto the site was probably looking for an official portal, not a Yoda costume for their pup. Nominet also concluded that Abscicca was taking advantage of the popularity of the Star Wars name to drive people to its site, essentially under false pretenses.

You can’t really fault Nominet’s logic, so the fact it’s sided with Disney isn’t much of a surprise. Abscicca still has the opportunity to appeal, but even if the process drags on, the Disney machine probably won’t hesitate to put an army of lawyers to work. Or the two could just settle it with an old-fashioned lightsaber duel. If lightsabers existed, that is.

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Source: BBC

Uber ‘reviews’ its own app to justify London surge pricing

Uber often defends its “surge” price increases by explaining capitalism, but it took a new tack after a controversial surge in London. The city was gripped by a tube strike yesterday that brought train service to a standstill, forcing commuters to find other ways to get to work. The sudden demand for buses, taxis and ridesharing services kicked Uber’s app into surge mode, causing fares to triple at one point. That produced a lot of righteous anger in social media and the press, prompting the company to release an article “reviewing” its own app against others to show that surges are a good thing.

Uber compared its own wait times to Gett, Hailo and Adison Lee, and (wait for it) came out on top. Addressing the controversial fares, it said that the higher rates benefit everybody since more drivers are motivated to hit the road. And during the strike, it said that double the number of UberX drivers were available. It added that the surge fares weren’t actually that bad, since Uber pricing is often lower than taxis and other services to begin with.

Nevertheless, its own chart also showed that a £19 cab far could’ve run as high as £32.50 when surge pricing hit 2.5X in the AM (it went as high as 2.9X). Uber said that it provides users with a clear warning about surge pricing, and offers the option of waiting for it to go down. It also reminded everyone that “no one has to travel when surge pricing is in effect – it’s entirely your choice.” Still, other see it differently. A London mayoral candidate told the Guardian, “Uber may be very clever with their ‘dynamic demand,’ but it still looks like a rip-off when you are struggling to get to and from work while the tube is out of action.”

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Source: Uber

Mollusc-inspired robot will hunt you down one hop at a time

A team of Harvard and UC San Diego scientists believes the perfect robot is neither rigid nor soft — instead, it’s a combination of both. To prove that, the group (led by Michael Tolley from UCSD and Nicholas Bartlett from Harvard) has created a hybrid robot capable of over 30 untethered jumps without breaking into pieces. It’s also faster than completely squishy ones, which are typically slow. The top half composed of nine layers 3D printed in one piece has a soft exterior that gradually becomes more rigid as you get to the inner core. On the other hand, the bottom’s entirely flexible, with a cavity where you can inject a mixture of butane and oxygen. After being ignited, the gases swell and cause the robot to jump.

These two halves protect a rigid inner compartment, where you can find the machine’s circuit board and power source, among other components — and they sure did a great job during testing. In fact, the robot successfully hopped two-and-a-half feet high and half a foot forward for more than 100 times, as well as fell to the floor 35 times from a height of four-and-a-half-feet in the laboratory. The rigid version it was pitted against quickly shattered.

If you’re wondering, Tolley and Bartlett got their inspiration from nature, including a species of mussel with a soft foot that hardens when it touches rocks. Tolley said machines created using both soft and rigid materials could lead into a new breed of “fast, agile robots that are more robust and adaptable than their predecessors [that] can safely work side by side with humans.”

[Image credit: UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering/Flickr]

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Source: UC San Diego, Science

NASA satellite shows black hole ‘bulls-eye’ eruption

NASA said its Swift satellite has imaged some of “the best dust-scattered X-ray ring images ever seen” from a black hole outburst. The V404 Cygni black hole and its companion star, about 8,000 light years away, are known to eject high-energy particles every 20 years or so. Swift’s X-ray telescope detected the start of a new burst on June 15th, grabbing the attention of scientists at the University of Leicester, UK. On June 30th, they captured an eruption of concentric rings from the system that covered a portion of the sky about half the diameter of the moon.

The rings are actually multiple layers of interstellar dust between 4,000 and 7,000 light years away. Some X-rays from the black hole burst hit Swift’s X-ray detectors directly, while others reflected off the dust, delaying their arrival slightly. That makes the rings appear to “echo” into space, the same way that sound reverberates in a canyon. The echoing is useful to scientists, helping them see the rings evolve over time. “With these observations, we can make a detailed study of the normally invisible interstellar dust in the direction of this black hole,” said lead researcher Andrew Beardmore.

The researchers aren’t totally sure why V404 Cygni’s X-ray bursts happen so sporadically, but they do have a theory. The black hole’s companion star orbits it every 6.5 days at a close distance, meaning it’s likely distorted into an egg shape by the gravity. Material ejected by the star accumulates around the black hole until it reaches critical mass. At that point, “thermonuclear runaway” fusion rapidly burns up the material, creating a bright X-ray flash. Suffice it to say, that’s just one reason you wouldn’t want to live on a planet in that star’s system, as Interstellar showed,

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Source: NASA