Month: October 2017

Statoil

The world’s first floating offshore wind farm began delivering electricity to the Scottish grid today.

The 30MW installation, situated 25km (15.5mi) from Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, will demonstrate that offshore wind energy can be harvested in deep waters, miles away from land, where installing giant turbines was once impractical or impossible. At peak capacity, the wind farm will produce enough electricity to power 20,000 Scottish homes.

Enlarge / The Tesla Factory is an automobile manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, and the principal production facility of Tesla. The facility at the foot of the Fremont Hills manufactures the Model S and X. (credit: Corbis Unreleased / Getty Images News)

In a new lawsuit, three former Tesla workers claim that they were routinely harassed and subjected to racial epithets during their time at the Fremont, California, factory.

The men, who are all African-American, allege that shortly after they began work in 2015, their co-workers and superiors began taunting them and called them "n****r" on a regular basis.

The lawsuit, which was filed in Alameda County Superior Court on Tuesday, is the second such suit brought this year on behalf of former Tesla employees represented by Lawrence Organ, a local civil rights attorney. Organ did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.

HP

Imagine that you're a digital artist. You like the idea behind Microsoft's Surface Pro—a good touchscreen with pen support, tablet form factor for convenience, but adaptable into something like a laptop for when you've gotta write an e-mail—but you want something with a bit more potency. Perhaps you need to do 3D modeling, perhaps your Photoshop files are a bit too big and complex, perhaps you use Chrome so the Surface Pro's 16GB of RAM is too limiting.

Boy, does HP have the answer for you. The ZBook x2 joins HP's line of Surface Pro-like hybrid tablets, but as the Z in the name will indicate (at least, to those who are overly familiar with HP's product naming terminology), this is positioned as a workstation-class machine, sitting alongside HP's other PC workstations.

Enlarge

As part of iOS 11, Apple announced plans to add airport and mall interiors to its Maps app. A few early examples of that rolled out earlier this year, but now the airport lineup has greatly expanded. New airports are already available in the app.

Oakland International (OAK), Miami International (MIA), Minneapolis-St. Paul International (MSP), Baltimore–Washington International (BWI), Portland International (PDX), and McCarran International in Las Vegas (LAS), as well as two airports in Chicago—O'Hare International (ORD) and Midway International (MDW)—have been added. These are in addition to San Jose International (SJC) and Philadelphia International (PHL), which were in beta versions of iOS 11.

When you find an airport on the map, you'll see indicators for each terminal. Tapping a specific terminal will zoom you in to a view of that terminal's floor plan, with markers representing various stores and shops, as well as gate numbers and security checkpoints. Markers for restaurants and shops can be tapped for more information. The airports are searchable, too.

A state lawmaker in Michigan wants to prevent cities and towns from using any government funding to provide Internet service. Michigan Rep. Michele Hoitenga, a Republican from Manton, last week submitted a bill that says cities and towns "shall not use any federal, state, or local funds or loans to pay for the cost of providing qualified Internet service."

Hoitenga is the chair of the Michigan House's Communications and Technology committee, which will consider the bill.

About 20 states, including Michigan, already have laws restricting municipal broadband in some way, effectively shielding private broadband providers from competition even as many residents lack robust broadband options. But while these states generally let cities and towns offer Internet service if they meet certain criteria, the Hoitenga bill doesn't give local governments much leeway.

Two aviation security officers involved in the April incident in which a 69-year-old doctor was violently removed from a United Airlines flight have been fired. The doctor, David Dao, suffered a broken nose, the loss of two teeth, and a concussion in an event that went viral on the Internet after it was captured by passengers' mobile phones.

The Chicago Department of Aviation did not release the names of the officers who were fired. Another resigned and a fourth official was briefly suspended in the O'Hare International Airport episode, in which Dao had refused to give up his seat on a flight to Louisville that was overbooked. He was forcibly removed. Dao later sued the airline and settled for an undisclosed amount. The ordeal also prompted United's CEO, Oscar Munoz, to publicly apologize.

Chicago's inspector general on Tuesday confirmed earlier reports that the officers involved had suggested that it was Dao's fault that he struck his face on an armrest before he was dragged off the plane.

Enlarge / If a license like Star Wars isn't enough to justify a big single-player game budget, what is?

Yesterday's news that EA is shutting down Visceral Games is bad news for fans of franchises like Dead Space and for the studio's unnamed Star Wars project. But the abrupt shutdown has also caused a bit of an existential crisis to creep into the game industry chatter regarding the future of big-budget, single-player, story-driven gaming in general.

The core of all that worry comes from a section of the blog post EA's Patrick Söderlund wrote to announce Visceral's shutdown (emphasis added):

Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe. In its current form, it was shaping up to be a story-based, linear adventure game. Throughout the development process, we have been testing the game concept with players, listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play, and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace. It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design.

That's all a bit vague, but the wording suggests that the "story-based, linear adventure game" being planned didn't look like it was going to turn a profit given "fundamental shifts in the marketplace." In other words, they started making Uncharted and now they want Destiny.