News and design logo

Cosmically renowned scratch DJ QBert hangs out with us on today's episode -- we'll talk about funding his new album Extraterrestria on Kickstarter, digging in the crates, vinyl vs. digital, and Bay Area hip hop.

January 31, 2014 11:17 AM PST

Justin Yu

Justin Yu covers headphones and peripherals for CNET. When he's not wading through Web gulch or challenging colleagues to typing tests, you can find him making fun of technology with Jeff Bakalar every afternoon on The 404 show..

Aereo's arrays of tiny antennae let consumers watch live, local television broadcasts online.

(Credit: Aereo)

Aereo, the online TV start-up headed to the Supreme Court later this year, has run out of capacity for new members in New York, where the service launched in 2012.

Chief Executive Chet Kanojia confirmed a report by DSL Reports on Twitter.

Aereo, backed by IAC Chairman Barry Diller, offers a cloud-based DVR that lets users record over-the-air programming and play it back on personal devices, charging $8 a month for its cheapest package. The company has not disclosed how many members it has, or how much capacity it has in any given market.

An Aereo spokewoman said Aereo continues to experience strong growth across all its markets, and the company is working overtime to add more capacity. When that capacity is up, "new consumers will be notified that they can sign up and create an Aereo account."

The hiccup comes before two of the biggest broadcast television events of the year: the Super Bowl, which will air Sunday on Fox, and the Sochii Olympic games, which will air on NBC through most of February.

Media companies (including CBS, the parent of CNET) have sued Aereo in multiple states, claiming Aereo violates their copyrights by streaming their broadcasts without paying the networks a fee for the programming. Aereo has said its set-up -- with an individual antenna for every subscriber, and an individual copy of the content for each user -- is the same as operating each member's antenna of his or her behalf, connecting it to the Web, and letting that member use the antenna however they see fit, which is allowed under copyright law. The US Supreme Court will hear the case later this year.

That one-antenna set up also means that when enough people sign up for Aereo in one of it's markets, no more can until more antennas are added.

Aereo launched in New York in March 2012, and since then has expanded to 11 total cities, including Boston, Atlanta, Miami, Salt Lake City, Houston, Dallas, Detroit, Denver, Baltimore and Cincinnati.

The company aimed to be in 22 total cities last year, but has been held back technical difficulties on top of accumulating legal wrangling.

Its rollout in Chicago, what would have been its biggest market after New York, remains in limbo because of difficulty weatherproofing antennas, and the company has faced problems in Pittsburgh as well.

Read: Aereo's Supreme Court battle may change how you watch TV

In December, Kanojia said Aereo would roll out to four or five more cities in the remaining weeks of the year. Failing that, he said at the Consumer Electronics Show that it would roll out to those cities in the first quarter.

So far, the courts have largely ruled on Aereo's side but as with any case before the Supreme Court, the ultimate ruling is difficult to predict.

Driverless trucks head down the road in a test of the AMAS program for the Army and Marines.

(Credit: Lockheed Martin)

Google may have the best-known driverless vehicles, but the US Army surely has the largest.

Defense industry heavyweight Lockheed Martin said Thursday that testing has wrapped up on a series of advanced tests in the Autonomous Mobility Appliqué System (AMAS) program for the US Army and US Marine Corps. The testing, Lockheed said, showed that fully autonomous convoys can operate in urban environments and with a mixture of vehicle types.

What challenges did these driverless vehicles face? The trucks had to navigate road intersections, oncoming traffic, stalled and passing vehicles, pedestrians and traffic circles in test areas both rural and, with less margin for error, urban.

Somewhat like the jury-rigged systems seen on the first generation of robotized cars, the AMAS program for the Pentagon's ground troops uses standard-issue vehicles outfitted with a kit of gear including a high-performance LIDAR sensor and a second GPS receiver, locked and loaded with a range of algorithms. That gear, Lockheed said, could be used on virtually any military vehicle, but in these tests was affixed to the Army's M915 tractor-trailer trucks and to Palletized Loading System vehicles. (The photo above shows a pair of PLS road warriors followed by an M915.)

AMAS-equipped vehicles can still be operated manually by human drivers, and the sensing and control function in a truck in self-driving mode should alert its occupants to safety threats.

Consumers and businesses can't go out and buy robo-cars just yet, but the era of driverless rides is nearly upon us. Google has been front and center in the effort to integrate robo-cars into real-world environments, and a range of automakers, from Nissan and Lexus to Audi and GM, have been getting in on the game.

Meanwhile, a handful of states -- California, Nevada, and Florida -- have made it legal to test driverless cars on public roads. The latest round of AMAS testing, though, took place earlier this month in the wide open, and much less public, environs of Fort Hood, Texas.

Convoys are commonplace arrangements for military vehicles, of course, but research shows that similar platooning of civilian vehicles could save fuel, fit more cars on the road, and even improve road safety.

"The AMAS CAD hardware and software performed exactly as designed, and dealt successfully with all of the real-world obstacles that a real-world convoy would encounter," said David Simon, AMAS program manager for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, in a statement. (In this case, CAD refers to the Capabilities Advancement Demonstration portion of the AMAS program, not to computer-aided design.)

The development and testing of the AMAS platform stems from an $11 million contract that Lockheed Martin received from the Defense Department in October 2012.

AMAS algorithms also are used to control the company's Squad Mission Support System, a more distinctive and less conventional six-wheeled unmanned ground vehicle that has been used by soldiers in Afghanistan.

A new international group meets for the first time in February to coordinate efforts to predict and prevent major asteroid impacts.

(Credit: ESA)

Next week in Germany, representatives of all mankind's space-faring nations will get together in a room to begin coordinating efforts to prevent the end of the world...or at least to figure out how to identify and prevent really big space rocks from smacking us around like that meteor that hit Russia last year.

We've all watched those scenes in science fiction movies where the leaders of the planet (or planets) all sit around a large table and come to a consensus about the best way to confront the latest existential threat. I'm always left wondering where the heck they get such a huge table, and how they managed to come up with a unanimous plan of action in less than 5 minutes. It's a little different from the endless gabfest of political posturing translating to minimal real-world action that is a meeting of today's United Nations.

Or is it? The first ever meeting of the Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group (SMPAG, pronounced "same page" -- see what they did there?) set to be hosted by the European Space Agency on February 6 and 7 sounds a little more like the Hollywood version of consensus-making, just with less melodrama and fewer ridiculously beautiful people everywhere.

SMPAG was created under the auspices of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and represents the first-ever international effort to get all of humanity on yes, the same page, when it comes to responding to asteroid threats. The first meeting of the group next week will include more than 30 representatives from the UN and 13 space agencies from five continents.

"SMPAG will also develop and refine a set of reference missions that could be individually or cooperatively flown to intercept an asteroid," Detlef Koschny, head of the ESA's near-Earth object program, said in a statement. "These include precursor missions or test and evaluation missions, which we need to fly to prove technology before a real threat arises."

Reading between the lines of that bureaucrat-speak, what SMPAG really amounts to is a bunch of nerds getting together to rewrite the script of 1998's "

"As a first step, the group will study each agency's organizational and operational capabilities, specific technologies and scientific abilities, and propose options that make best use of who can do what, the best," Koschny said.

As faithful Crave readers are well aware, a number of asteroid-tracking and interception efforts are already in the works. NASA is looking into capturing its own pet asteroid for study and the ESA's Rosetta spacecraft is set to land on a comet later this year.

Just think, if we can land a robot probe on an orbiting comet, maybe the notion of sending Bruce Willis to jump on an asteroid and nuke it before it annihilates us all isn't just a Hollywood premise after all. But maybe we could try a little old-fashioned C-4 first...if SMPAG is ready to make the call.

It's been a bit of a rollercoaster week, dear readers. T'was expected to be quiet, but a series of fascinating announcements quickly changed that. The biggest? Google's sale of Motorola to Lenovo for $2.9 billion. That's a fair bit less than the $12.5 billion the Googs paid back in 2012, which on the surface makes this look like a terrible deal. But dig a little further and it doesn't seem too bad.

For starters, Google sold off the company's set-top box business, Motorola Home, last year for $2.3 billion. And, more importantly for Google, it's keeping the "vast majority" of the patents that it acquired as part of the acquisition in the first place. The company certainly still lost money on the deal, but it isn't quite as bad as it seems.

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

As to what happens next, that remains to be seen. Google keeps the patents it says it needs to defend the Android ecosystem. Lenovo gets the North American smartphone leg-up it desperately wants. (The company tried to buy BlackBerry last year, but was shut down by the Canadian government.) And, hopefully, Motorola gets a supportive parent that will provide the resources necessary to thrive. Whether the company will keep its US manufacturing and employees is the big question on the minds of many, including myself, but given that Lenovo already has a major presence in the US, don't be so quick to rule out the possibility.

Microsoft SkyDrive becomes OneDrive

(Credit: Microsoft)

After another painful trademark ruling for Microsoft, its SkyDrive cloud storage service was found to be a little too similarly named to the offerings of British Sky Broadcasting, the company announced an intention to rename it. This week, we learned its new nom de guerre: OneDrive. While sadly ditching the heavenly connotations of the previous name, if anything OneDrive helps to drive home the concept of unified storage across the many platforms that Microsoft currently offers. These days, even a hint of oneness is a good thing.

Satya Nadella tipped as next Microsoft CEO

(Credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

It's been a lengthy courting process for Microsoft in finding who would be next to take the reins, attempting to fill the big, boisterous shoes of Steve Ballmer. A Bloomberg report this week indicates that insider Satya Nadella is set to get the nod. Nadella leads Microsoft's cloud computing push, an incredibly vital shift for the company as desktop revenues appear to continue to dwindle going forward. Obviously having a presence on hardware will be an important aspect for Microsoft for some time to come, but it must dominate the cloud if it hopes to maintain its current size.

After disappointing earnings, Amazon may raise Prime $40

(Credit: Amazon)

2013 revenues of $74.45 billion for Amazon, up 22 percent from the year before, weren't enough to keep the company's investors happy. The stock dropped 8 percent after the company posted earnings, which led to it quickly pledging ways to rake in even more cash. CFO Tom Szkutak indicated that the company may be losing a little too much on its Prime service, which includes free two-day shipping as well as streaming movies and Kindle book rentals. The $79-per-year service may soon bump to $99 or perhaps even $119 per year. Something tells me impatient buyers will continue to cough up the dough. I know I will.

Appleseed-style exoskeleton set to dominate cosplay conventions

If you're looking to impress at a comic or anime convention, you'd best dress for success -- the wilder the better. You'd also best hope that representatives from Dai-Nihon Giken don't show up. The company, which manufactures plenty of anime-related toys and gear, has created a giant, motorized exoskeleton in the spirit of the Appleseed series. A human being (naturally clad in spandex) can go inside and walk normally, while a set of auxiliary arms provide super strength. In theory. Check out the video above, and then start counting the days from now until Halloween.

Nancy Klauber-DeMore of the UNC School of Medicine. The medical school's lab was the first to discover that angiosarcoma cells produce an excess of the protein SFRP2.

(Credit: UNC School of Medicine)

Ultrasound as an imaging technique has several things going for it. For one, it's more affordable than CT and MRI scans, and it's portable, so it can easily travel to rural and low-infrastructure areas or patients who are house-bound. And unlike with CT scans and X-rays, there is no ionizing radiation exposure, hence its widespread use imaging fetuses in pregnant women.

Unfortunately, the high-frequency soundwave approach to viewing soft tissue doesn't provide great resolution, so despite all its perks, it's not the go-to imaging tech for cancer detection. Now, thanks to a new discovery out of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, that may soon change.

By combining ultrasound imaging with a special contrast agent, researchers say they've been able to greatly improve the resolution -- and consequently tumor-detecting ability -- of sonograms. Reporting this week in PLOS ONE, the biomedical engineers say they were able to visualize lesions created by a malignant cancer that forms on blood vessel walls called angiosarcoma.

The secret, it turns out, is in the contrast agent, which is made up of microbubbles that bind to the protein SFRP2. One of the researcher's labs was the first to discover that this type of cancer produces an excess amount of SFRP2, so by using a contrast agent that targets the culprit protein, they were able to visualize the malignant tumors in detail.

"In contrast, there was no visualization of normal blood vessels," said professor of surgery Nancy Klauber-DeMore in a school news release. "This suggests that the contrast agent may help distinguish malignant from benign masses found on imaging."

For this work, the researchers injected the microbubble contrast agent into mice and tracked it using ultrasound. And because SFRP2 is expressed in many cancer types, from kidney and pancreas to breast and colon, and increases as tumors develop, Klauber-DeMore said the next step is to see whether they can use this imaging tech to detect very small tumors as well as track tumor growth.

Ultrasound may never overtake extremely powerful imaging techniques like CT and MRI, but if it is in fact able to visualize tiny tumors and discern malignant from benign ones, it could very well become an affordable alternative in many parts of the world.

He'd cut your liver out and saute it.

(Credit: Jaguar/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

American advertisers always want you to believe that their core is made of saccharine and honey.

Buy my American brand and your world will be more idyllic than a night spent with Jimmy Stewart.

The Brits, on the other hand, occasionally like to reveal a dark heart below their hardened upper lip.

How touching, then, that Jaguar, a quintessentially British brand now owned by India's Tata Motors, has decided to admit to its evil underbelly.

In a Super Bowl ad to champion its quite pretty F-Type sports car, Jaguar bares its soul.

Featuring Tom Hiddleston, Mark Strong, and the nasty, nasty Ben Kingsley, the ad posits an important cultural question: "Have you ever noticed that in Hollywood movies, all the villains are played by Brits?"

What follows are the three characters uttering quite forced dialogue that's vaguely related to cars.

This is a pity.

It would have been more striking if we'd heard Kingsley say: "I will personally come to your house, slice your liver out, and saute it in your own frying pan if you don't buy this car."

It would have been more memorable if Strong had mused: "If you're not at your local Jaguar dealership within 90 minutes, I will use Google's very fine maps and your own cell phone to trace you. Then I will bind you, gag you, toss you into a very British drawing room where I will feed you to my 100 hungry rottweilers."

After all, the tagline that can briefly be glimpsed at the end of the spot is: "How alive are you?"

The Brits never like to speak directly. So a reasonable interpretation of this tagline might be: "We'll kill you if you don't buy the F-Type."

I think ratcheting up the threats would work. Americans adore violence, just as much as they fear sex.

Or am I being a little too Hollywood here?