Month: March 2017

Enlarge / The Vallejo Police Department initially dismissed the kidnapping allegations as a hoax. (credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images News)

A California man who pleaded guilty last year to a strange and elaborate kidnapping operation in 2015 has now been sentenced to 40 years in prison. The defendant, Matthew Muller, was later caught as part of a separate burglary later that month but initially denied the kidnapping.

Local media reported Tuesday that the two victims are now engaged to be married—just days after speaking at Muller's sentencing hearing—and that Muller could face fresh criminal charges brought by local prosecutors in Solano County.

In a statement issued last week, just after his sentencing hearing, federal prosecutors said that Muller, himself a disbarred attorney and former United States Marine, got what he deserved.

It won’t cost automakers nearly as much as they say it would to fit new cars with carbon-saving technology over the next decade, a nonprofit transportation research group says.

An economic analysis performed by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) found that, given recent improvements in auto technology, the EPA’s rigorous study to determine 2025 fuel efficiency standards may have been too conservative, in some cases overstating the per-car cost of implementing carbon-reducing technologies by 40 percent.

The analysis comes at a time when the Trump Administration has moved to undo the fuel efficiency standards imposed by the EPA in January under the Obama Administration. Trump’s EPA has claimed that asking the auto industry to meet fuel efficiency standards of more than 50 mpg by 2025 would cost American jobs. (The ICCT notes that this mpg number can be reduced by about 23 percent during “real-world” driving "due to factors like greater real-world acceleration and operating in hot and cold temperatures" and accounts for that in its study.)

(credit: Qualcomm)

When it announced the Snapdragon 835, Qualcomm promised that the latest in its family of ARM systems-on-chips would boost performance by 27 percent with a 40 percent reduction in power consumption. The first early benchmarks of the processor that Qualcomm doesn't want us to call a processor have been run and the results are... well, they're a little uneven.

Anandtech went to Qualcomm's San Diego headquarters and was shown the 835 running in a hardware platform reference—a basic smartphone built around the chip that serves as a platform for hardware testing and software development. During this visit, they were able to run a handful of basic benchmarks to gauge the performance of the new chip.

Naively, one would assume that Snapdragon 835 would be faster than the 820/821 that went before it. 835 is, after all, a higher number than 820, and higher numbers usually mean better when it comes to processors. But the situation with the 835 is more complicated than that. In the early days of the modern smartphone era, Qualcomm's 32-bit ARM Snapdragon chips were generally best-in-class. While many ARM chips use core designs that are developed by ARM itself in the UK, Qualcomm did something different; it had a pair of custom designs, Scorpion in 2008 and Krait in 2012, developed in house. These designs were broadly superior to ARM's Cortex-A8, A9, and A15 designs that other companies were using.