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Microsoft comes to its senses, allows Office 2013 to move PCs

In a substantial regression from the terms offered for Office 2010, the original Office 2013 license died with your PC . You couldn’t install a retail copy of Office on a new PC, even if you removed it from the old one. But after much public outcry, Microsoft has relented . The Office 2013 terms and conditions are being updated so that transfers are allowed. You’ll be allowed one transfer every 90 days unless the transfers are due to hardware failures. (In that case they can be made immediately.) The change is effective immediately, but it will take some time before it trickles out to the activation servers. If you’re transferring Office 2013 to a different PC and activation fails, you’ll have to call customer support. Microsoft insists that the support people know the score and will be able to activate you manually. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Microsoft comes to its senses, allows Office 2013 to move PCs

Newly spotted miles-wide comet bearing down on Mars

A comet spotted earlier this year may pass close enough for Mars to feel the rock’s hot breath down its neck, according to new reports that surfaced Monday and Tuesday. The comet, named C/2013 A1, may pass within a few tens of thousands of miles of Mars’ center, with a remote chance that the miles-wide comet will collide with the planet. C/2013 A1 “Siding Spring,” a comet between 5 and 30 miles wide, was spotted January 3 by astronomer Robert H. McNaught. Researchers were able to look back in the image history of the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona and spot signs of the comet as early as December 8, 2012. NASA states that other archives have traced sightings back to October 4, 2012. According to scientists at NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office , Siding Spring originates from the Oort Cloud of our Solar System and has been journeying to this point for more than a million years. In less than two years, around October 19, 2014, the comet will pass very close to Mars. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Newly spotted miles-wide comet bearing down on Mars

Five features iOS should steal from Android

Aurich Lawson, Age 5 If you’ve come anywhere near a tech site in the last year or so, you’ve heard it all before. “iOS is getting stale compared to Android! It needs some new ideas!” Whether that’s actually true is up for (heated) debate, but those with an open mind are usually willing to acknowledge that Apple and Google could afford to swap a few ideas when it comes to their mobile OSes. So in a fantasy world where we could bring over some of the better Android features to iOS, which features would those be? Among the Ars staff, we sometimes have spirited “conversations” about what aspects would be the best for each company to photocopy. So, we thought we’d pick a few that might go over well with iOS users. Don’t worry, we have a companion post of features that Android could afford to steal from iOS. The copying can go both ways. No one wants iOS to become Android or vice versa. This is about recognizing how to improve iOS with features that would be useful to people depending on their smartphones for more than the occasional text or phone call. We recognize that Apple tries to keep an eye towards elegant implementation, too. So which features are we talking about? Glad you asked… Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Five features iOS should steal from Android

Sodium-air battery shows potential

Pete Slater With battery technology being critical for so many things, interest in building better batteries just keeps on growing. The recent Tesla Model S testing debacle, explosive laptop batteries , and Boeing battery problems give us hints at how close to the edge engineers operate batteries. Volume, weight, and energy are key. Minimize the first two and maximize the last to obtain energy storage nirvana. Lithium-ion batteries rule the roost at the moment, but as capacities are already on the order of 200Wh/kg, we’re pushing up against their limits—basic chemical reactions provide a fixed amount of energy. The search for alternatives is being pursued by a rapidly growing field of eyebrow-less engineers (just kidding; battery mishaps don’t happen that often ). A recent publication on a sodium-air battery shows promise, but it also demonstrates what a huge amount of work still needs to be done. The key to a battery is a simple chemical reaction that, at its heart, is the exchange of an electron. During the exchange, a certain amount of energy is released, usually in the form of heat. That’s why, when you drop some sodium metal in water, the energy released is enough to cause explosions. The role of the battery is to intercept that electron and release its energy in the form of useful work. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sodium-air battery shows potential

Adobe releases third security update this month for Flash Player

Adobe has released an emergency security update for its widely used Flash media player to patch a vulnerability being actively exploited on the Internet. The company is advising Windows and Mac users to install it in the next 72 hours. An advisory the software company issued on Tuesday said only that affected Flash flaws “are being exploited in the wild in targeted attacks designed to trick the user into clicking a link which directs to a website serving malicious Flash (SWF) content.” It identified the bugs as CVE-2013-0643 and CVE-2013-0648 as indexed in the common vulnerabilities and exposures database . The advisory added the exploits targeted the Firefox browser. A spokeswoman said no other attack details are available. Adobe’s advisory assigns a priority rating of 1 to Flash versions that run on Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X computers. The rating is reserved for “vulnerabilities being targeted, or which have a higher risk of being targeted, by exploit(s) in the wild.” The priority for Linux users carries a rating of 3, which is used to designate “vulnerabilities in a product that has historically not been a target for attackers.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Adobe releases third security update this month for Flash Player

Earthquakes’ booms big enough to be detected from orbit

Artist’s impression of GOCE satellite. European Space Agency Last year, we reported on some mysterious booms in a small Wisconsin town that turned out to be small earthquakes. While it was an unusual story, it’s actually not that uncommon of an occurrence. Early in the summer of 2001, folks in Spokane, Washington started reporting similar booms. The sounds continued, off and on, for about five months. The mystery didn’t last long, as the earthquakes responsible were picked up by seismometers in the area. (A particularly loud one that took place exactly one month after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York did rattle some nerves, however.) In total, 105 earthquakes were detected, with a couple as large as magnitude 4.0. For most of them, there wasn’t good enough seismometer coverage to really pinpoint locations, but some temporary units deployed around the city in July located a number of events pretty precisely: the earthquakes were centered directly beneath the city itself. While a dangerously large earthquake is pretty unlikely in Wisconsin, the possibility can’t be ignored in Washington. The 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand was only a magnitude 6.3, but the damage was extensive because the epicenter was so close to the city. In L’Aquila, Italy, a swarm of small earthquakes in 2009 was followed by a deadly magnitude 6.3. (The poor public communication of risk during that swarm netted six seismologists manslaughter convictions .) Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Earthquakes’ booms big enough to be detected from orbit