On May 18th, 2012, attorneys for Oracle and Google were battling over nine lines of code in a hearing before Judge William H. Alsup of the northern district of California. The first jury trial in Oracle v. Google, the fight over whether Google had hijacked code from Oracle for its Android system, was wrapping up. The argument centered on a function called rangeCheck. Of all the lines of code that Oracle had tested -- 15 million in total -- these were the only ones that were "literally" copied. Every keystroke, a perfect duplicate. It was in Oracle's interest to play up the significance of rangeCheck as much as possible, and David Boies, Oracle's lawyer, began to argue that Google had copied rangeCheck so that it could take Android to market more quickly. Judge Alsup was not buying it. "I couldn't have told you the first thing about Java before this trial," said the judge. "But, I have done and still do a lot of programming myself in other languages. I have written blocks of code like ...

The pandemic of sexual harassment and abuse--you saw its prevalence in the hashtag #metoo on social media in the past weeks--isn't confined to Harvey Weinstein's casting couches. Decades of harassment by a big shot producer put famous faces on the problem, but whisper networks in every field have grappled with it forever. Last summer, the story was women in Silicon Valley. Earthquakes of this magnitude are never any fun for people atop shifting tectonic plates. But the new world they create can be a better one.

Are you considering buying an electric car, but have concerns about how you'll charge it while on the go? A new patent granted to Amazon might have the answer to this problem. The patent details a drone that can dock into electronic vehicles while they're moving to charge them. Pictured is an illustration from the patent file, showing an example of the drone docking system. The system would work by deploying a drone to connect to the docking mechanism, thereby allowing it to charge the vehicle while it's moving or stationary A new patent granted to Amazon details a system that would allow a drone to dock into electronic vehicles while they're moving in order to charge them.

It's time we start talking about AI regulation. As the technology progresses at a rapid pace, it is a critical time for governments and policymakers to think about how we can safeguard the effects of Artificial Intelligence on a social, economic and political scale. Artificial Intelligence is not inherently good or bad, but the way we use it could well be one or the other. Unfortunately, there has been little attention paid by such governing bodies as yet in regard to the impact of this technology. We're going to see huge changes to employment, privacy, and arms to name a few, that if managed incorrectly or not at all, could spell disaster.

At least $80 billion has been funneled into driverless car technology over the past three years, according to a new report, underscoring how the pace of development has accelerated in recent years. The Brookings Institution published research on Monday that tallied all the investments and transactions associated with self-driving cars and technologies from August 2014 to June 2017. The researchers acknowledged that there were several limitations to their data collection, however, so "it is reasonable to presume that total global investment in autonomous vehicles is significantly more than this." While it's debatable when driverless cars will be available to the masses, Congress is already taking steps to create the first federal laws governing their testing and deployment. The House passed autonomous vehicle legislation earlier this month, while a similar bill is making its way through the Senate.

Nicolas Economou is the CEO of electronic discovery and information retrieval firm H5, a Senior Advisor to the AI Initiative of the Future Society at Harvard Kennedy School, and is an advocate of the application of scientific methods to electronic discovery. If asked whether entirely autonomous, artificially intelligent judges should ever have the power to send humans to jail, most of us would recoil in horror at the idea. Our answer would be a firm "Never!" But assume that AI judges, devoid of biases or prejudices, could make substantially more equitable, consistent and fair systemwide decisions than humans could, nearly eliminating errors and inequities. Would (should?) our answer be different?

Authorities say the couple was prostituting the woman with physical and mental disabilities and advertising her online while forcing her to live in a shed after she was unable to pay them rent. Welch and George were arraigned earlier this month. George also is charged with using computers to commit a crime.

The right to due process was inscribed into the US constitution with a pen. A new report from leading researchers in artificial intelligence cautions it is now being undermined by computer code. Public agencies responsible for areas such as criminal justice, health, and welfare increasingly use scoring systems and software to steer or make decisions on life-changing events like granting bail, sentencing, enforcement, and prioritizing services. The report from AI Now, a research institute at NYU that studies the social implications of artificial intelligence, says too many of those systems are opaque to the citizens they hold power over. The AI Now report calls for agencies to refrain from what it calls "black box" systems opaque to outside scrutiny. Kate Crawford, a researcher at Microsoft and cofounder of AI Now, says citizens should be able to know how systems making decisions about them operate and have been tested or validated.

In the high-stakes contest to land Amazon's new headquarters, many consider Boston to be a serious contender competing against other big technology hubs around the United States and Canada. But it's also competing against its neighbors: Several smaller Massachusetts cities -- along with Rhode Island and southern New Hampshire -- are each submitting their own pitches to Amazon, using proximity to Boston's tech talent as a major draw. "Talent really is the unquestionable, huge priority," said Brian Dacey, president of the Cambridge Innovation Center and a former Boston economic development director who says the region could make a strong case for luring the Seattle e-commerce company. Local research strengths -- such as in artificial intelligence and robotics -- are important to Amazon's business model, he said. The Seattle company is promising $5 billion of investment and 50,000 jobs in whichever North American region it chooses to build a second headquarters.

Members of the US Supreme Court pose for a group photograph at the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC. In 2007, a group of California Institute of Technology scientists working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory filed suit against the venerated space agency. Many of the scientists had worked on NASA missions and research for years as outside employees. As part of efforts to tighten security measures after 9/11, in 2004 NASA started requiring outside workers to submit to the same kind of background checks used for federal employees, including questions about drug use. The scientists, some of the nation's best and brightest, protested and resisted for years, and finally went to court to argue that the checks violated their privacy rights. The case ultimately made it to the US Supreme Court, where, in 2011, the justices unanimously sided with NASA. Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion, made a central point of noting that such background checks had long been commonplace in the private sector. Alito even cited a very specific statistic: 88 percent of all private companies in the country conduct such checks, he wrote. It was a powerful claim in a decision with real consequences for American workers. Alito, it turns out, had borrowed the statistic from a brief filed in the case by the National Association of Professional Background Screeners. ProPublica asked the association for the source of its statistic. The association offered a variety of explanations, none of which proved true, and ultimately conceded it could not produce evidence that the 88 percent figure was accurate or say where it came from. The decisions of the Supreme Court are rich with argument, history, some flashes of fine writing, and, of course, legal judgments of great import for all Americans.