Month: April 2017

Nintendo has recently said that its portable 3DS still has "has a long life in front of it" and that it will "coexist just fine in the marketplace" alongside the recently launched hybrid Switch. Last night's announcement of a new 2DS XL redesign also suggests Nintendo might not be done supporting its aging portable platform, despite the Switch's monumental market success so far.

If recent history is any guide, though, the 3DS will only enjoy a few more years of active support from Nintendo before being fully phased out.

A solar thermal plant in the US. (credit: SolarReserve)

It’s not always a simple task to compare the value of electricity generation resources. Coal, natural gas, solar, wind, and so on have different strengths and weaknesses, so when it comes time to build or replace energy capacity, economists look at the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE), which divides the total cost of an installation or plant by the kilowatt-hours it produces over its lifetime.

While private financial firms like Lazard calculate their own LCOE figures, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) also puts together an annual report projecting the LCOE for various generation resources. The report, released this month, looks at the cost of generation resources if they were to come online in 2019, 2022, and 2040.

The latest numbers seem to confirm trends that have borne out recently in energy markets—overall, some renewables are getting more attractive, others are struggling, and coal has definitely been unseated as king.

A veteran of the Cold War and a recent participant in Russian operations off Syria has been sent to the bottom of the Black Sea by a boat full of sheep. The 47-year-old Russian intelligence collection ship, the Liman, sank on April 27 after a collision in the Black Sea with a Togo-flagged livestock carrier carrying sheep from Romania to Jordan. The sheep-carrying Youzarsif H suffered only slight damage to its bow, but the Liman suffered a rupture in its hull below the waterline.

Designated by the Russian Navy as a "medium reconnaissance ship" ("Средний разведывательный корабль"), the Liman was smaller than more recently constructed, purpose-built intelligence ships like the Leonov (the spy ship that traveled up the US East Coast in February). Originally built as a hydrographic survey ship in 1970, it was converted in 1989 into a signals-intelligence collection ship, a class of vessels known in US naval parlance as AGIs (auxiliary, general intelligence). The conversion added passive underwater acoustic sensors along with electronic warfare equipment for collecting radio and radar signals.

Enlarge / Google Fiber equipment boxes in a Kansas City home in 2012. (credit: Google Fiber | Bloomberg)

Google Fiber is getting ready to build a long-awaited network in Louisville, Kentucky despite recent layoffs at the ISP and lawsuits filed against Louisville's local government by AT&T and Charter.

"Great news today, with Google Fiber saying they now officially are coming to Louisville. We've been working on this for years," Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said Wednesday in a video. Google Fiber could use both fiber and wireless technologies to connect customers.

Fischer made a nearly identical statement in September 2015 when he said Louisville was "announced as [the] next Google Fiber city." But there have been a few complications since then.

Enlarge / Employees inspect an Uber self-driving car in Pittsburgh last year. (credit: Getty Images)

Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski will be stepping back from his position as head of the company's self-driving car project.

Levandowski is at the heart of a heated trade-secrets lawsuit that Google's Waymo division filed against Uber in February. Google says Levandowski, an ex-Googler, illegally grabbed more than 14,000 files on his way out the door. Levandowski went on to create his own self-driving car startup, Otto, which Uber later bought for $680 million.

In an internal Uber e-mail, which was obtained and published by Business Insider, Levandowski said he's being removed from all work related to Lidar, a key self-driving car technology which uses lasers to map objects in the physical world.