Month: April 2016

I probably could have made this up if I tried, but you wouldn't believe it if I did. (credit: Trump Effect)

In a US presidential campaign season full of unexpected moments and petty squabbles between candidates and public figures of all stripes, today's interaction between Donald Trump and Electronic Arts still ranks as one of the oddest. This afternoon, the publisher issued a YouTube takedown notice for a video supporting Donald Trump that uses voices and music from 2010's Mass Effect 2, after the candidate himself tweeted the video approvingly to nearly 7.5 million followers earlier in the morning.

The ad, which appears to have been created by an individual fan with no official connection to the Trump campaign, draws directly from Mass Effect 2's launch trailer, overlaying a speech from Martin Sheen's Illusive Man character with videos and photos from modern America. "We're at war," Sheen intones over scenes of generalized and specifically Trump-related chaos. "No one wants to admit it, but humanity is under attack. One very specific man might be the only thing that stands between humanity and the greatest threat of our brief existence."

The Mass Effect content is roughly intercut with images and messages from Trump supporters, as well as lines from Trump's stump speech about making America great again. It ends with the message that "the American people are DONE with career politicians" and an entreaty to "GO OUT & Vote for Trump." Yet there are some signs the video could be an elaborate, trollish joke against Trump, including an image with the non sequitur purported Trump quote, "No more oreos!"

(credit: Jeff Bezos via Twitter)

Amazon has been focusing its efforts on the tablet, TV, phone, and digital personal assistant markets for the last few years, but the company has never forgotten its quietly competent lineup of dedicated Kindle e-readers. Today, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took some time off from running his newspaper and shooting things into space to announce that there will be an "all-new, top of the line" eighth-generation Kindle announced next week. Consider this an announcement of the announcement.

Amazon's current flagship Kindle is the Kindle Voyage, a very nice but very expensive $200 gadget with an auto-brightness sensor and a tablet-y design. The new model will presumably replace the Voyage instead of the more sensible $120 Kindle Paperwhite, but we'll have to wait until next week to hear more details and news about pricing and availability.

If you want a good dedicated e-reader and don't really care about having the latest and greatest features, Amazon is currently offering big discounts on current-generation Kindles for Amazon Prime members. The $200 Voyage is being offered for $150, the $120 Paperwhite is being sold for $90, and the $80 standard Kindle is being sold for $50.

Former Verizon customers who were switched over to Frontier Communications on Friday are still reporting outages and other problems today.

Verizon sold its FiOS and DSL networks in California, Florida, and Texas to Frontier, but the transition has not been smooth. On Friday, Frontier acknowledged a "technical issue" involving the integration of systems, but the company said it had been fixed by 9:30am ET that morning.

That assurance seems to have been premature, with customers still reporting problems on DownDetector and Twitter throughout the weekend and today. "Onto the 4th day without Internet or any working account...any timeframe guys? This is getting really crazy!" one California customer complained today.

The rear window. (credit: Megan Geuss)

When Elon Musk took the stage Thursday night at his Hawthorne design facility, the CEO of Tesla revealed a pre-production prototype of the Model 3, the company’s highly anticipated $35,000 car. The presentation was short and included a summary of Tesla’s history, a status update on the Gigafactory, and a look at how Tesla plans to expand its supercharger stations.

Actual details about the Model 3's specifications were slim. We learned that it will come with top-rated safety features and supercharging, even for the basic version of the car. We learned that all the Model 3s will come with the hardware necessary for autopilot features. (Although certain autonomous functions will require the customer to buy an upgrade.) And we learned the car will go 215 miles on a single charge at a minimum, and it will get from zero to 60 in “less than six seconds.”

Before the event, Musk called Thursday night’s event "Part 1" of the Model 3's debut, later adding that “Part 2 is super next level, but that’s for later…” The Model 3 isn’t due out of production until the end of 2017.

(credit: Oran Viriyincy)

A federal judge is allowing surge-pricing litigation to move forward against Uber's cofounder, Travis Kalanick. The federal judge presiding over the suit, which alleges Uber's technology unlawfully coordinates fares and surge-pricing fares, agreed that Uber's algorithm was "genius."

"Defendant argues, however, that plaintiff's alleged conspiracy is 'wildly implausible' and 'physically impossible,' since it involves agreement 'among hundreds of thousands of independent transportation providers all across the United States.' Yet as plaintiff's counsel pointed out at oral argument, the capacity to orchestrate such an agreement is the 'genius' of Mr. Kalanick and his company, which, through the magic of smartphone technology, can invite hundreds of thousands of drivers in far-flung locations to agree to Uber’s terms," US District Judge Jed Rakoff of Manhattan ruled (PDF) Thursday. "The advancement of technological means for the orchestration of large-scale price-fixing conspiracies need not leave antitrust law behind."

Trial is set tentatively for November. Rakoff has yet to rule on whether the lawsuit (PDF) could grow to represent millions of US Uber passengers in a nationwide class-action lawsuit. For the moment, Rakoff's ruling allows the antitrust case of a Connecticut passenger to proceed. Uber also faces regulatory challenges and lawsuits about the classification of its drivers as contractors and not employees.

The experimental setups can be very complex, with imaging equipment, other sensors, sample handling hardware, and more all accessing the site where the beam comes through. (credit: John Timmer)

Today, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is starting construction on a second X-ray laser that will be even brighter and more intense than its first. The new hardware, based on a superconducting linear accelerator (or linac), will replace about a third of the length of the original accelerator and leave the facility's existing X-ray laser intact.

The SLAC facility is a linear electron accelerator that was originally built to characterize the W and Z bosons. After the frontier of high-energy physics shifted to CERN, the hardware was repurposed to create an extremely powerful X-ray laser.

When charged particles are forced to move along a curved path, they lose energy in the form of radiation. If they're moving at sufficiently high energies, that radiation takes the form of X-rays. At SLAC, an X-ray laser is generated by accelerating electrons and then forcing them through a series of carefully space magnets (called undulators or wigglers) that cause the particles to curve back and forth. The end result of all the radiation they emit is an intense beam of X-rays that can be used for a variety of imaging applications.