Month: April 2017

Enlarge / A picture taken in Vertou, western France, shows Facebook logos. (credit: LOIC VENANCE/AFP/Getty Images)

With the first round of the French presidential election just nine days away, Facebook is tightening up its game with regards to false information being shared in users' news feeds.

Last week, Facebook said it would start publishing notifications about its "10 tips to spot fake news" at the tops of users' feeds. The tips include pretty basic ideas like closely examining the URL, article date, and source, as well as encouragement to "check the evidence" and suggestions to compare the "news" to other articles. Here's the full list of tips.

The idea was just to flag the tips for "a few days" in 14 countries, but today it looks like the war against fake news is far from over. With a major election upcoming, Facebook—which saw mounting criticism following the US election in November—is eager to let the world know it's on watch against false information.

Disney just dropped the first teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi as part of this week's Star Wars Celebration in Orlando. (You can watch a livestream of the Last Jedi panel here.) Suffice it to say that it looks amazing and delivers pretty much everything you'd want in a teaser—just a peek with extremely low spoiler levels.

First of all, our main characters are back. We catch a glimpse of Finn in some kind of medical pod, looking alive and well. Poe is in full hunky resistance fighter mode racing around with BB-8. Kylo is glowering out of the shadows like a Marilyn Manson fan circa 1995. And the Millennium Falcon is swooping around like the modded, overclocked machine that she is. There are snippets of battles and one shot of a fantastic-looking flight across the surface of a planet where giant red plumes arc out of the desert floor behind some ships. It looks very Mad Max: Fury Road, and I mean that as a high compliment.

Best of all, at least to this viewer, we see Luke doing what appear to be Yoda-esque "use the Force" exercises with Rey on the island where we left them at the end of The Force Awakens. Rey is learning to levitate little rocks and using her mind to feel the balance of light and dark in the Force. (Tearful moment as we glimpse the back of Leia's head when Rey mentions "the light.") There are also some ancient books and maps in Luke's monk cave, which is interesting—I don't recall seeing any Jedi books in paper form before, though we saw lots of augmented reality classrooms in previous films.

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California regulators are recommending that Uber pay a $1.13 million fine for not investigating rider complaints that drivers were working intoxicated.

A division of the California Public Utilities Commission said Uber breached (PDF) so-called "zero-tolerance" guidelines demanding that transportation companies promptly investigate drunken-driving complaints consumers lodge with those companies. These types of companies generally are required to suspend suspect drivers when a complaint is lodged pending the outcome of an internal investigation.

One-fourth—about 147,000 drivers—of Uber's US workforce operates in California.

Note: MST3K isn't really the kind of show that can be "spoiled," but this review references a handful of jokes from the first two episodes of the new show. You have been warned. 

I am watching the first new episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 that I’ve seen since September of 1999. And 20 or 25 minutes in, I am cautiously optimistic.

Enlarge / Shawn Doyle as Sadavir Errinwright. (credit: Rafy/Syfy)

My my, wasn't that a lot of palace intrigue in this week's episode of The Expanse? With season two rapidly drawing to a close—just one episode left—Errinwright has finally made his play, as has Jules-Pierre Mao. I'll admit that I didn't think Errinwright had it in him. We got to see a much more human side to his character this week, followed by a lovely bait-and-switch by the writers. "Earth first" indeed.

With Bobbie Draper and Coytar in tow, Avasarala went to meet Mao on his orbital gin palace—spaceships look pretty good if you're a gazillionaire. Again, the show has done an effective job of visualizing the kinds of small details that the books can only tell you about, part of the world-building that keeps me so engaged. Will Mao's ultimatum work? After Errinwright's actions this week, I wouldn't bet on it. But who couldn't love the needling between Draper and Coytar?

The tone was quite different for the scenes with Naomi on the Weeping Somnambulist. With only enough air for 52 people and more than 100 refugees trying to get off Ganymede, it turned into quite a tear-jerker, particularly Champa's exhortation to his fellow belters to remember who they are and how they live (and die).

Enlarge / Breath of the Wild is like an angelic light shining on the totem of the Switch's hardware launch.

The word "system seller" gets thrown around a lot in video games to identify a game that's good enough to justify buying a new console practically on its own. We may have to figure out a new term to apply to a system seller as hot as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, though. In the US, it seems the Switch version of the game is somehow selling better than the system it's played on.

Those numbers come from the NPD group and Nintendo, which report that while the Switch sold 906,000 units in the US in March, the Switch version of Breath of the Wild sold "more than 925,000 units." That's the first instance we can recall where a piece of software has a reported attach rate that's actually higher than 100 percent.

Breath of the Wild's reported sales success doesn't come completely out of the blue. Gamestop said last month that the game had an "almost one-to-one attach result" with the Switch hardware, and the title sold to about 91 percent of initial Switch owners in France. Nintendo President Reggie Fils-Aime also called Breath of the Wild the best standalone launch title in Nintendo history just after the system's US launch.

Enlarge / NASA's Journey to Mars has been long on hype, short on reality. (credit: NASA)

NASA has been talking about its "Journey to Mars" for the better part of this decade now, along with its plans to send humans to the Martian system in the 2030s. One thing the space agency hasn't done, however, is talk too much about costs. From experience, the agency has learned the woes of giving Congress "sticker shock" when it comes to exploration programs.

However, a new report by NASA's inspector general chastises the agency for not doing so earlier. "Such estimates would help inform other decision makers and stakeholders in the Administration, Congress, and research and business communities of the magnitude of the sustained investment required to make human exploration of Mars a reality by the late 2030s or early 2040s," the report states.

The report also attempts to provide such a cost estimate based on an updated version of a study done by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This analysis budgeted for a crewed landing on the Martian moon Phobos in 2033, a one-month Mars surface stay in 2037, and one-year surface stays in 2041 and 2046. The updated cost: $450 billion over the next three decades.