Month: June 2017

Enlarge (credit: Sam Machkovech)

SANTA MONICA, California—Before giving us a world-premiere look at StarCraft Remastered's gameplay, the franchise's holders at Blizzard rattled off a few major rules for how the game would be made. "Blend classic with modern." "Community's voice." One of the buzz phrases made Blizzard Classic Games Producer Pete Stilwell laugh: "Don't be disruptive." "That's how I was told to say, 'Don't fuck it up,'" he said.

Stilwell had already set that PR guidance aflame when he loudly declared his development team's mantra of preserving original games' systems and mechanics at all costs. "We're not here to change classics from a gameplay perspective," Stilwell said. "We're not here to fuck with that. We say, 'don't fuck it up,' all the time. Do not ruin this game."

The Blizzard Classic team appears to have pulled that off with a game that, for better or for worse, plays, feels, and, in a few cases, looks just like the 1998 version. StarCraft Remastered's announced price, $14.99/£12.99, reflects that aesthetic, as it has mostly been built to slap new paint on old mechanics. But executing that "plays exactly the same" mission—while making the new game (launching August 14 on PC and Mac) look demonstrably improved over the original and sneaking a few changes in—wasn't a complete breeze.

The Sequoyah Nuclear Plant. (credit: Nuclear Regulatory Commission)

President Trump gave a speech about energy in the US today, highlighting six policy issues that will direct his administration’s energy policy for the time being.

The initiatives Trump talked about today were a hodgepodge of new announcements and old policy, focusing on nuclear energy and fossil fuel exports. Despite calling for energy independence, Trump’s speech steered clear of renewable energy like wind or solar. Trump has falsely stated that climate change is a “hoax” and has appointed officials with close ties to the fossil fuel industry to top energy posts.

The new initiatives Trump did talk about included reviving and expanding the nuclear energy sector, reducing barriers to financing coal plants in foreign countries, opening up a new petroleum pipeline to Mexico, pushing more exports of natural gas, opening a natural gas export terminal in Louisiana, and relaxing restrictions on offshore oil and gas drilling.

Enlarge / For this map, red's bad. (credit: Hsiang, Kopp, Jina, Rising, et al. (Science, 2017))

One of the challenges of understanding climate change is that both the expected change in temperatures and the effects that will have vary depending on the location. So Oregon's climate won't change in the same way Georgia's will. And, even if it did, the impact of those changes will be different, since the two states start off with different climates and economies. So understanding the regional impact of climate change has been a real challenge.

But it's a challenge worth tackling since most of the planning for how to deal with climate change will have to occur at the regional level (especially in the US). Now, a group of researchers has built a model that tracks many of the economic outcomes of climate change, and it does so for every single county in the US' contiguous 48 states. The results show that the overall impact on the country as a whole will happen near the end of this century. But the model also shows that problems won't be evenly distributed, and the poorest counties are likely to bear the brunt of the damage.

Getting empirical

To generate the future temperatures, the researchers worked with the IPCC's emissions scenarios. They then used a set of simplified climate models to produce temperature and precipitation estimates for each month at the end of this century. Each day in that month had some weather variability added in order to make 10 different potential scenarios. These provide the raw material for estimating economic impacts, along with a range of possible outcomes.

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Zillow and McMansion Hell have buried the hatchet. The company won’t sue, and the blog won’t use images from Zillow anymore. However, the blog's creator, Kate Wagner, will keep all archival Zillow images (including her commentary) on her site.

In a brief statement, Zillow said it will “not pursue any legal action.” The company issued the statement shortly after an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney representing Kate Wagner fired back at Zillow in a five-page letter. Wagner is behind the viral architecture blog, McMansion Hell.

On Monday, Wagner received a demand letter from Zillow threatening a lawsuit over spurious copyright claims and possible violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is a federal anti-hacking law. Even more bizarrely, as the EFF letter pointed out, Zillow did not own the images in question—it merely licensed them from others. So it wasn’t clear how Zillow would have had standing to bring a suit. Plus, even if the company did somehow have standing, her satirical commentary was protected under the Fair Use doctrine of American copyright law.

Enlarge / Heather Bresch, CEO of Mylan NV, refers to a chart while speaking during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing in Washington, DC on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

A whopping 83 percent of Mylan shareholders voted down the company’s astronomical executive compensation packages. But a majority of shareholders still supports most of the company’s beleaguered directors, according to fresh filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Ars reported the general outcomes of the shareholder votes that took place last week at an annual meeting in Amsterdam. The vote was closely watched after a group of shareholders, disgruntled by the EpiPen pricing scandal and executive pay, began campaigning to reject executive pay plans and oust the board—something that requires a two-thirds majority under Mylan’s governance rules. Though shareholders did not unseat the incumbent board members, Mylan declined to reveal the vote tallies.

Those tallies, however, were revealed yesterday in a public filing with the SEC—and they’ve reignited calls for resignations and reform.

Enlarge / Closeup of Chargepoint electric-vehicle charger at Google headquarters in Silicon Valley (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images). (credit: Getty Images)

Car-charging network Chargepoint announced that it would buy General Electric’s electric vehicle (EV) charging stations today for an undisclosed amount of money. Chargepoint also announced a $42 million investment from Siemens, which will be used to improve European infrastructure for EVs.

The purchase of the GE stations will add close to 10,000 charging stations to Chargepoint's network, with 1,800 commercial charging stations and 8,000 residential. GE’s charging hardware and software won’t be changed, but Chargepoint said in a press release that existing GE station customers and owners would be able to “take advantage of smart features such as access control, pricing capabilities, and software solutions like energy management and scheduled charging.” Drivers who previously used GE charging stations can now track their usage and search for Chargepoint stations through the company’s mobile app.

The latest $45 million investment in the company from Siemens closed out a $125 million funding round (Daimler was the other largest investor in this round). Siemens supplies ChargePoint with direct-current charging components. Ralf Christian, CEO of the Siemens Energy Management Division, will join the Chargepoint board of directors.

Enlarge / Cryptolocker was one of the ransomware pioneers, bringing together file encryption and bitcoin payment. (credit: Christiaan Colen / Flickr)

The latest Windows 10 build, today's 16232, contains a few new security features. In addition to the richer control over exploit mitigation that Microsoft announced earlier this week, the new build also includes a trial of a new anti-ransomware capability.

The long-standing approach that operating systems have used to protect files is a mix of file ownership and permissions. On multi-user systems, this is broadly effective: it stops one user from reading or altering files owned by other users of the same system. The long-standing approach is also reasonably effective at protecting the operating system itself from users. But the rise of ransomware has changed the threats to data. The risk with ransomware comes not with another user changing all your files (by encrypting them); rather, the danger is that a program operating under a given user's identity will modify all the data files accessible to that user identity.

In other words, if you can read and write your own documents, so can any ransomware that you run.

Enlarge / L to R: Jon Bernthal, Eiza González, Ansel Elgort, and Jon Hamm have just robbed a bank. (credit: Working Title)

Baby Driver is the new film from Edgar Wright opening in theaters this week. I'm here to tell you it's jolly, jolly good. Consider it an old-school, analogue, manual transmission alternative to the CGI, self-driving car nonsense that was the most recent Fast and Furious movie, if you will.

With that out of the way, let's unpack a little more. Written and directed by the brain that gave us Spaced, Shaun of the Dead (and the rest of the Cornetto trilogy), and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the film is a heist caper that focuses on the role of the getaway driver—the titular Baby, played by Ansel Elgort. Orphaned at a young age, he learned to boost cars and drive them with no small measure of skill. But one day he stole the wrong car, one belonging to criminal mastermind Doc (Kevin Spacey); one carrying a rather valuable cargo that left Baby in hock and working heists to pay off his debt.

Baby is an unlikely member of Doc's constantly rotating crew of tooled-up robbers, one the others (including memorable roles from Jamie Foxx, Jon Bernthal, Eiza González, and Jon Hamm) don't exactly trust. He's a quiet chap, eyes hidden behind dollar-store sunglasses, white Apple earbuds almost permanently affixed to his ears. The reason for the latter is a case of tinnitus—the result of the same car crash that orphaned him—and also the excuse for the movie's relentless, deep-cut soundtrack. But despite his youthful looks and semi-detached presence in the briefings, it quickly becomes clear there's no one else you'd rather have behind the wheel.