Month: July 2016

Image Comics

The covers of each comic are reminiscent of pulp exploitation movies of the 1960s.

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With its deliberately shocking name and over-the-top imagery of scantily clad women fighting in prison, Bitch Planet looks like the comic book version of a 1960s exploitation movie. If you've ever watched Russ Meyer's classic flick Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, you know what I'm talking about. But this comic book, written by Kelly Sue DeConnick and drawn by Valentine De Landro (the two also co-created the concept), manages to do something unexpected. Somehow, by depicting sensationalized violence and extreme future scenarios, DeConnick and De Landro manage to tell a surprisingly subtle story about the dangers of political conformity.

Image Comics recently published the first Bitch Planet collection, Extraordinary Machine, which delivers a fairly complete arc while still leaving us on a good cliffhanger. The tale begins with a seriously creepy look at Bitch Planet, the isolated planet where "non-compliant" women are sent to "live out [their] lives in penitence and service." The prisoners are all tattooed with NC, for non-compliant, which has already become a popular geek tattoo in the real world. Mostly, the prison is run remotely from Earth by a team of wise cracking guys who deploy giant holographic women to order the inmates around, and punish them with stints in solitary where the wall screens are filled with mocking faces that tell the mostly innocent women how guilty and evil they are. Still, there are a few guards around to beat the crap out of anyone who dares to question how tight their prison garb is—and to murder some of the women for mysterious reasons. De Landro's art is both satirical and horrifically disturbing, and he's brilliant at including little details like ads or signs in the panel backgrounds that show us what this future Earth is like.

It's made of people

Slowly we realize that all this insanity is happening because Earth has fallen under the power of an authoritarian group known as the Council of Fathers, who rule with an iron fist but pretend to be kindly, priest-like elders. To please the Fathers, the Bitch Planet warden devises a scheme to enter a team of female prisoners into the "Megaton," a brutal rugby-like game that has become Earth's most popular sporting event. Indeed, the Council of Fathers requires all men to watch Megaton, because they believe this bloody, dangerous sport helps "exorcise" men's warlike urges so they can form peaceful political coalitions. Except, of course, the Fathers' rule is hardly peaceful. There are rigid economic divisions between men, and there are several scenes where we see powerful men humiliating and abusing their male underlings. Women, as you might guess, have no rights at all in this future. They are forced to become wives and mothers, or eke out a perilous existence on an economic ladder where they can only ascend a few rungs from the bottom.

The GTX 1060, Founders Edition. It looks much like the Founders Edition GTX 1070 and 1080, but it's a bit shorter.

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Nvidia has unveiled the GTX 1060, the most affordable member of its Pascal-based graphics card lineup yet. Starting at $250 (UK price TBC, but likely £220), Nvidia claims the GTX 1060 is faster than a GTX 980—a card that costs upwards of $400 (£380)—and features a power-sipping TDP of just 120W. It'll be released worldwide on July 19.

While the full technical details behind the GTX 1060 aren't available just yet, Nvidia has revealed that the card is based on a new GP106 chip, not a binned version of the the GP104 chip used in the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. The GTX 1060 sports 1280 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 8GHz (only a 6GB version will be available), and a boost clock of 1.7GHz that Nvidia claims is easily overclocked to 2GHz and beyond. Power supply is via a single 6-pin connector.

Like the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, the GTX 1060 will be available from manufacturers like Asus, Zotac, and Gigabyte, as well as directly from Nvidia in Founders Edition form at a higher $299 (~£260) price. The extra $50 buys a dual-FET power supply, as well as a similar blower-style cooler to the more expensive Pascal cards, albeit one made out of plastic rather than metal.

Those aren't side-view mirrors, those are side-view cameras.

Japan’s transportation ministry has approved mirrorless cars to drive on its roads, according to The Japan Times and Automotive News. The country green-lit the new policy after a United Nations’ working group on international auto standards said cameras could replace mirrors on cars if the camera systems met certain standards.

According to The Japan Times, “At first, monitors and the cameras must be positioned in the same place as current rear-view and side-view mirrors and offer the same views.” Transportation Ministry official Maseru Miyashita told the paper, “Getting used to (monitors instead of mirrors) is the main factor to ensure drivers’ safety.”

Mirrorless cars substitute analog rear- and side-view mirrors for cameras and screens. Advocates say that dropping side-view mirrors can make a car more aerodynamic and cameras can have a wider field of vision than a mirror. On the other hand, a mirror is a simple thing, and a camera and screen setup is complex, and, by nature, one is easier to fix than the other. In addition, as Automotive News points out, some in the auto industry have cautioned that although a rear-view camera can go a long way in eliminating blind spots, some drivers rely on the rear pillars in a car to gauge exactly where an object coming up behind the car is.