Month: March 2018

Enlarge / DETROIT, USA - JANUARY 15: Model of a Saudi Aramco internal combustion engine is on display during the North American International Auto Show at Cobo Center in Detroit, Michigan, on January 15, 2018. (Photo by David Graff/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

NATIONAL HARBOR, MD—A Wednesday morning panel at the ARPA-E summit provocatively asked if the auto industry is about to see ”The End of the Road for the Internal Combustion Engine?”

Though all the panel members agreed that gas- and diesel-based systems are on a path to losing market share, none would admit that the internal combustion engine (ICE) would be completely replaced by the electric vehicle (EV). At least before 2050. So what do industry leaders think will happen or should happen to the evolution of drivetrains in the future?

Perhaps the most interesting perspective came from Amitai Bin-Nun, a vice president in charge of autonomous vehicle innovation for the nonprofit Securing America’s Future Energy, or SAFE. Bin-Nun argued that, without a transition to autonomous vehicles, EVs would not see the mass-market adoption that boosters have been hoping for.

Enlarge / SteamVR's new resolution scaling update will help maximize GPU performance on the high-end HTC Vive Pro. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Just before the launch of the SteamVR-powered HTC Vive in 2016, Valve released a hardware testing tool to establish a minimum GPU power baseline for virtual reality. Now, with the impending release of the higher-resolution Vive Pro, Valve is updating SteamVR to ensure that higher-end headsets will work well at a variety of GPU power levels.

The auto-resolution scaling system, as described in a Steam Community announcement today, measures "how many 'VR megapixels per second' we believe your GPU is safely capable of for the majority of applications available." That number is then used to calculate the appropriate native resolution for the VR app being run, regardless of the display resolution of the attached VR headset.

That means systems with high-end GPUs will automatically see VR apps "up-res'ed" to "fully utilize" the power of the graphics card, Valve writes. The effect of that change will be most apparent on high-end headsets like the upcoming Vive Pro (which includes two 1400×1600 resolution displays) and certain Windows Mixed Reality headsets, but this kind of native "supersampling" can improve the clarity of VR apps even on years-old, "low-end" headsets like the Vive and Oculus Rift (which both have dual 1080×1200 displays).

Enlarge / California State Capitol building in Sacramento. (credit: Getty Images | joe chan photography)

A proposed net neutrality law in California would replace the repealed federal regulations, going beyond the federal rules by banning payments for data cap exemptions. If passed, the bill would ban AT&T's Sponsored Data, Verizon's "FreeBee" data, and any similar programs imposed by home or mobile Internet providers.

The bill would also try to prevent interconnection payment disputes that harm Internet service quality—such as those between Netflix and major ISPs in 2013 and 2014.

The legislation "is the first state-level bill that would comprehensively secure all of the net neutrality protections that Americans currently enjoy," according to Stanford law professor Barbara van Schewick. (The Federal Communications Commission repeal hasn't taken effect yet.)

Enlarge / One indication of Suriname's complicated past is its large Hindu population. (credit: David Stanley)

Tiny Suriname, the smallest country in South America, punches far above its weight in linguistic diversity. Many people speak Dutch, but if you visit, you're also likely to hear Hindi, Javanese, a variety of indigenous languages, Portuguese, Cantonese, and possibly others. This real-world Babel, in a country of fewer than 600,000 people, is a relic of Suriname’s colonial history.

The language that enables everyone to communicate is Sranan. It's a creole that serves as a linguistic time capsule, capturing Suriname’s brief tenure as a British colony before the territory was ceded to the Dutch in 1667. This time capsule status has allowed a group of researchers to use Sranan to reconstruct details about migration to the colony from England in the 1600s. Their results show how cultural artifacts could be used to trace human migration—and might one day help researchers trace the origins of enslaved people.

A living linguistic fossil

Creole languages arise in relatively extreme situations, when different groups of people find themselves in prolonged contact without a shared language—like in a young colony. People use bits of different languages to try to communicate, and over generations, these halting “pidgin” languages become fully fledged natural human languages: creoles.

Enlarge / A scene from the in-progress "Capital Wasteland" mod, which was shut down over legal issues surrounding voice acting files. (credit: Capital Wasteland)

An ambitious modding project that sought to recreate Fallout 3 inside Fallout 4 is shutting down over unforeseen legal issues surrounding the original game's voice acting.

"The Capital Wasteland: A Road To Liberty" project was a five-person effort to implement the base content of Fallout 3 as a mod for Fallout 4, complete with the latter game's graphical and engine improvements. In a message to supporters, though, project lead NafNaf_95 writes that the project has been shut down after a conversation with Bethesda, in which it "became clear our planned approach would raise some serious red flags that we had unfortunately not foreseen."

That planned approach involved an audio extraction tool that would have taken the voice acting from legitimate Fallout 3 files and converted them to a form that could be used in a Fallout 4 mod. Bethesda and an outside lawyer advised the Capital Wasteland team that extracting this licensed content, which wasn't fully owned by Bethesda, would be legally questionable under copyright law and could make the modders legally liable for damages.