Month: September 2018

Enlarge / An Ilyushin IL-20M intelligence collection aircraft, the type shot down Monday evening by Syrian air defenses. (credit: Kirill Naumenko)

On Monday night, a Russian Air Force Ilyushin IL-20 "Coot-A" electronic intelligence and radar reconnaissance aircraft monitoring the Idlib province of Syria was mistakenly shot down by Syrian air defense forces after an Israeli air strike on facilities in Latakia, Syria. The Russian aircraft went down in the Mediterranean, about 27 kilometers (17 miles) off the Syrian coast near Latakia, with a loss of all 15 crewmembers aboard. Russian President Vladimir Putin said the downing was the result of a "chain of tragic accidental circumstances." But the Russian Defense Ministry has laid the blame for the downing on the Israelis, saying that they failed to provide enough warning to the Russians to give the IL-20 an opportunity to steer clear of danger.

"The Israeli pilots used the Russian plane as cover and set it up to be targeted by the Syrian air defense forces," a Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson said. "As a consequence, the Il-20, which has a radar cross-section much larger than the F-16, was shot down by an S-200 system missile." The Russians also claimed Israel only warned them a minute before the attack.

Russian Army General Sergei Shoigu told Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman in a phone call that the fault for the reconnaissance plane's downing "rests entirely with the Israeli side."

Enlarge / An Ilyushin IL-20M intelligence collection aircraft, the type shot down Monday evening by Syrian air defenses. (credit: Kirill Naumenko)

On Monday night, a Russian Air Force Ilyushin IL-20 "Coot-A" electronic intelligence and radar reconnaissance aircraft monitoring the Idlib province of Syria was mistakenly shot down by Syrian air defense forces after an Israeli air strike on facilities in Latakia, Syria. The Russian aircraft went down in the Mediterranean, about 27 kilometers (17 miles) off the Syrian coast near Latakia, with a loss of all 15 crewmembers aboard. Russian President Vladimir Putin said the downing was the result of a "chain of tragic accidental circumstances." But the Russian Defense Ministry has laid the blame for the downing on the Israelis, saying that they failed to provide enough warning to the Russians to give the IL-20 an opportunity to steer clear of danger.

"The Israeli pilots used the Russian plane as cover and set it up to be targeted by the Syrian air defense forces," a Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson said. "As a consequence, the Il-20, which has a radar cross-section much larger than the F-16, was shot down by an S-200 system missile." The Russians also claimed Israel only warned them a minute before the attack.

Russian Army General Sergei Shoigu told Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman in a phone call that the fault for the reconnaissance plane's downing "rests entirely with the Israeli side."

Enlarge (credit: Midwest Energy News / Flickr)

You probably think of someone who exemplifies the “keeping up with the Joneses” mindset as behaving in an obnoxious way. You may roll your eyes at a neighbor preening their immaculate clone-army-of-grass-blades lawn, but you probably still feel a tug that keeps you within the bounds of what our community considers normal. That apparently includes conserving energy.

In a new study, a team led by Columbia Business School’s Jon Jachimowicz and the University of Exeter’s Oliver Hauser set out to better understand why efforts to encourage reduced energy use get different results in different places. And they found evidence that community attitudes may make a bigger difference than personal ones.

Think of your neighbors

The researchers worked with data from a company called Opower, which shows utility customers how their energy use compares to others in their area. Opower randomly selects its participants and keeps a control group of customers for comparison.

Enlarge (credit: Midwest Energy News / Flickr)

You probably think of someone who exemplifies the “keeping up with the Joneses” mindset as behaving in an obnoxious way. You may roll your eyes at a neighbor preening their immaculate clone-army-of-grass-blades lawn, but you probably still feel a tug that keeps you within the bounds of what our community considers normal. That apparently includes conserving energy.

In a new study, a team led by Columbia Business School’s Jon Jachimowicz and the University of Exeter’s Oliver Hauser set out to better understand why efforts to encourage reduced energy use get different results in different places. And they found evidence that community attitudes may make a bigger difference than personal ones.

Think of your neighbors

The researchers worked with data from a company called Opower, which shows utility customers how their energy use compares to others in their area. Opower randomly selects its participants and keeps a control group of customers for comparison.

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during a product launch event on September 12, 2018, in Cupertino, California. (credit: NOAH BERGER/AFP/Getty Images)

European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager said Tuesday that the European Commission will finally close its legal investigation into Apple's failure to pay back taxes to Ireland after the company paid €14 billion.

Today Irish Minister of Finance @Paschald confirmed the full recovery of €14 bn of illegal aid to Apple (unpaid taxes). Good. So we can close the Court action on recovery.

— Margrethe Vestager (@vestager) September 18, 2018

Ireland's finance minister, Paschal Donohoe, applauded the EC's move.

Positive news this evening that the @EU_Commission is closing the Court action and dropping infringement proceedings following on from recovery of of alleged State aid from Apple. Always Ireland's intention to comply with our legal obligations in this regard

— Paschal Donohoe (@Paschald) September 18, 2018

Over two years ago, Ireland was formally referred to the European Court of Justice after it failed to implement a 2016 order that required the island nation to collect the same amount in unpaid taxes.

Enlarge / Hyper-V Quick Create.

Microsoft and Canonical have been working for some time to make Ubuntu and Windows play nice with each other. Ubuntu was the first distribution supported in the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and now an Ubuntu image is available through Hyper-V Quick Create, which offers three-click creation of Virtual Machines.

The system image has Ubuntu Desktop 18.04 LTS configured and ready to go, and this showcases some of the other Linux integration work that Microsoft has been doing. The Hyper-V virtual machine client, Virtual Machine Connection, has two ways of working. The normal way is to display the output of the virtual video card that the virtual machine uses and, similarly, to emulate PS/2 mouse and keyboard input, as if the client were the physical hardware. This works with any operating system (the virtual video card supports rudimentary modes like VGA and the text mode used by DOS; it can also support high-resolution graphics modes when used with a suitable display driver). But it is relatively slow and inflexible.

The other way, used automatically with modern Windows VMs, is "Enhanced Session Mode." In an Enhanced Session, the virtual machine transmits a variation of RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol, Microsoft's protocol for Windows' Remote Desktop features) directly to the hypervisor, which then delivers it to the Hyper-V client. Enhanced Sessions have a number of advantages: you can resize the client window, and the VM is notified of the change of resolution; you can copy and paste between the virtual machine and the host; there's automatic sharing of folders between guest and host; and the mouse doesn't get trapped inside the client window.

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

SAN FRANCISCO—Luxury electric SUVs must be like buses: you wait ages for one and then three show up all at once. That's certainly how it feels right now—first it was the Mercedes-Benz EQC, then last week BMW showed us the iNext, and on Monday night it was the Audi e-tron. This one is going to reach showrooms first—production just started at a carbon-neutral plant in Belgium in the past few weeks, and US deliveries are scheduled to begin in mid-2019.

That's sufficiently far off that Audi is still in the process of homologating the US version for sale, so some of its vital statistics are still TBA. We can't tell you how exactly much power you get for $74,800, although the European version is 300kW (402hp), if that helps. It hasn't undergone EPA testing yet, so there's no official word of how many miles of range the 95kWh lithium-ion battery provides. (Again, if it's helpful, the e-tron earned a 400km range on the very different European WLTP test.)

And I'm sad to say the e-tron's coolest feature—those side-view cameras—will require some changes to federal vehicle regulations before we can get them here in the US. That goes for the matrix-beam headlights, too. That's a shame, because this is an electric Audi that was designed with the US in mind. The company expects us to be the biggest market for the e-tron, and it's pitching this one straight into the mainstream. There are no flashy falcon wing doors or a massive panoramic screen like those in the bigger Tesla Model X. Neither are there futuristic design or racetrack credentials as with the Jaguar I-Pace.