Month: December 2017

Enlarge / I will jump at literally any chance to use this picture, which shows off Aurich's fine photochop skills. From left to right is Peter Bright, Lee Hutchinson, Jonathan Gitlin, and Kyle Orland. (credit: Disney / Aurich Lawson)

This Star Wars-related op-ed does not contain any spoilers for The Last Jedi, other than a mention or two about porgs. It does, however, have some spoilers for the rest of the mainline series and possibly Rogue One.

A few years ago, when Disney acquired the rights to Star Wars, one of the first things the House of Mouse did was to throw the almost-wholly-execrable Expanded Universe into the garbage chute. With the stroke of a pen, tens of thousands of pages of what was effectively fan fiction (and written like it) became dianoga chow—and good riddance. The tiny portions of the EU worth saving—mostly culled from the work of Timothy Zahn, maybe with a bit of Stackpole tossed in for flavor—were given new life in the redefined canon, but jettisoning the rest of it was a necessary step. It removed a giant calcified tumor from the Star Wars universe’s colon, and doing so gave Disney the latitude it needed in order to tell its own stories without having to fact check everything on Wookiepedia first.

But for older folks who grew up with Star Wars—particularly us GenX-ers and proto-Millennials born in the late '70s and early '80s who experienced the movies for the first time as very young kids—it signaled something more ominous. When Obi-Wan decided to train Anakin, it was with the expectation that he would bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness (though maybe Obi-Wan should have thought through all the possible implications of what “balance” could mean in that context). Similarly, when Disney bought the franchise, the dumping of the EU was the first sign that Disney might not be out to “save” Star Wars—at least, not how we’d prefer it to be saved. In fact, by jettisoning the EU, Disney looked like it might have been about to ruin Star Wars for us. And how dare they? Star Wars was ours!

This one—the Prius Prime plugin—might be the pick of the bunch. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

On Monday, Toyota pledged that “by around 2025” every new Toyota or Lexus model vehicle will have an electrified version, whether it be a hybrid electric, a plug-in hybrid electric, or a battery electric version.

The Japanese automaker also said that it is updating its sales goals to target selling 5.5 million electrified vehicles annually by 2030, including more than one-million zero-emissions vehicles (that is, battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles) annually. Toyota reportedly sold 1.4 million hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) in 2016.

Toyota has had success with its line of fuel-efficient hybrids for 20 years, but, for a while, the company was tepid about the future of full battery-electric models and seemed to favor a future of fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV). Toyota has argued that running a car exclusively on battery power adds extra weight to the vehicle and creates concern among customers about range. Instead, Toyota argued, FCEVs were easily refuel-able. Hydrogen fuel can fill a tank as quickly as gas can, and FCEVs have a range similar to traditional internal combustion vehicles. In addition to marketing the Toyota Mirai passenger vehicle, the company began testing a long-haul fuel-cell semi at the Port of Long Beach as of April. In February, Toyota partnered with Shell to explore building seven hydrogen refueling centers in California.

Enlarge / The flow of glaciers into the sea has accelerated in this vulnerable area of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet along the Amundsen Sea. (credit: NASA Earth Observatory)

Sea-level rise is one of the more challenging effects of climate change to project. It’s not that the direction of the change is unclear—sea level will rise as the planet warms—but it’s extraordinarily difficult to know when which sections of which glaciers will slide into the sea. Many factors are involved besides temperatures, including ocean currents and the topography of the bedrock below ice sheets.

As a result, the projections of sea-level rise presented to entities like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have been heavily caveated and have changed significantly over time. The 2013 IPCC report, for example, projected considerably higher sea-level rise than the 2007 report, which explained that it was leaving out important ice-sheet processes that needed more research. And the recent 2017 US National Climate Assessment again increased projections of sea-level rise based on the current state of the science.

A new study from a group of researchers led by Rutgers’ Bob Kopp has made for splashy headlines in recent days, some of which claimed the study showed that sea-level rise will be “worse than thought” or that the study confidently predicted how many people would be inundated by rising seas this century. Neither description is really true, as there is nothing new about the sea-level rise scenarios shown. In fact, Kopp also helped put together the sea-level chapter of the US National Climate Assessment, and the numbers in the new study obviously match those in the report.

Enlarge / This is a still of Ajit Pai’s December 13, 2017 video. (credit: Daily Caller)

The public Twitter war over net neutrality has gotten ridiculous, now with Donald Trump, Jr. joining Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in denouncing legendary Star Wars actor Mark Hamill, who in turn slammed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai over the recent repeal of net neutrality.

The saga all started last week on the eve of the momentous vote, when Pai appeared in a video posted on The Daily Caller, a conservative news website.

As part of the cutesy video, Pai told Internet users that they could still “stay part of their favorite fandom” and briefly wielded a lightsaber.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. While Christmas is creeping closer and closer, there are still a handful of discounts worth checking out for those who haven't finished their holiday shopping. Today's list includes Bose's QuietComfort 25 noise-cancelling headphones marked down to $150; just note that this version comes with an iPhone-specific mic and cable (an Android version is also discounted, but costs $170).

There's plenty more beyond that, though, so have a full look at the list below.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Enlarge (credit: Kaspersky Lab)

Kaspersky Labs, the embattled security vendor, has sued the Department of Homeland Security on Monday. The company alleges that, because the agency essentially blacklisted the Kaspersky in September over its alleged links to the Russian government, it has unduly suffered as a result.

Specifically, Kaspersky says that, due to the way DHS’s Binding Operational Directive (BOD) was issued, the company didn’t have adequate time to respond to the government’s concerns, which immediately had a deleterious effect on its business.

“While DHS professed to give Plaintiffs an opportunity to contest the BOD and change DHS’s decision before the 90-day mark, by allowing Kaspersky to make a written submission to DHS near in time to the 60-day mark, this process was illusory and wholly inadequate because it failed to satisfy even the minimum standards of due process,” lawyers representing Kaspersky wrote in the civil complaint filed Monday in federal court in Washington, DC.

Enlarge (credit: Chesnot/Getty Images)

On Monday, Twitter said it would begin enforcing new rules that were announced a month ago as a way to "reduce hateful and abusive content."

In particular, the new rules ban violent threats or even "wishing for serious physical harm." For now, the most prominent accounts that have been removed for running afoul of these rules were three affiliated with a far-right United Kingdom group known as "Britain First." (For an example of the group's content: last month, President Donald Trump retweeted violent videos from the group that claimed to show violence perpetrated by Muslim immigrants to Europe, when in fact it did not.)

Twitter did not provide a list of other accounts that have been immediately affected, and the company did not respond to Ars’ request for comment pre-publication.