Month: June 2019

Enlarge / Hulu also distributed this poster for the new season. (credit: Hulu)

As the premiere for a new season of fan-darling-TV-series-brought-back-from-the-dead Veronica Mars draws closer, Hulu has released the first full trailer for the show.

Previous clips were just teasers, but this one really fleshes out what viewers can expect. In general, it looks like it will retain the original series' wit and darkness, just without the heavy 2000s-ness of it all. Since Veronica is a grown-up, working private investigator now, it looks a bit edgier in some ways, with guns and the like playing a more prominent role than they did in the original series. (Previously, Veronica usually relied on her dog Backup or her taser to do her dirtiest work.)

In this reboot, the small seaside town of Neptune, California has seen a rash of bombings of late, and Veronica and her father are hired by the family of one of the victims to figure out what’s going on.

Enlarge / Actress Jessica Biel supporting prominent anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in an effort to protect non-medical vaccine exemptions. (credit: Instragram)

Anti-vaccine advocates received a blow in New York Thursday as state lawmakers banned non-medical exemptions based on religious beliefs—and there may be more blows coming.

]Also on Thursday, the American Medical Association adopted a new policy to step up its fight against such non-medical exemptions. The AMA, the country’s largest physicians’ group and one of the largest spenders on lobbying, has always strongly support pediatric vaccination and opposed non-medical exemptions. But under the new policy changes, the association will now “actively advocate” for states to eliminate any laws that allow for non-medical exemptions on the books.

“As evident from the measles outbreaks currently impacting communities in several states, when individuals are not immunized as a matter of personal preference or misinformation, they put themselves and others at risk of disease,” AMA Board Member E. Scott Ferguson, M.D. said in a statement. “The AMA strongly supports efforts to eliminate non-medical exemptions from immunization, and we will continue to actively urge policymakers to do so.”

Enlarge / Justice. (credit: Brian Turner / Flickr)

A federal judge in Minneapolis has sentenced Paul Hansmeier to 14 years in prison for an elaborate fraud scheme that involved uploading pornographic videos to file-sharing networks and then threatening to sue people who downloaded them.

“It is almost incalculable how much your abuse of trust has harmed the administration of justice,” said Judge Joan Ericksen at a Friday sentencing hearing.

We've been covering the antics of Hansmeier and his business partner John Steele for many years. Way back in 2012, we started reporting on a law firm called Prenda Law that was filing lawsuits against people for sharing pornographic films online. Prenda wasn't the only law firm filing these kinds of lawsuits, but Prenda came up with a novel way of ginning up more business: uploading the films itself, including some that were produced by Prenda associates.

Enlarge / Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson join forces as Agent H and Agent M to ward off an alien attack in Men in Black: International. (credit: YouTube/Sony Pictures)

A pair of shapeshifting aliens with electrifying powers and mad breakdancing skills threaten the safety of Earth's inhabitants in Men in Black: International. The fourth installment in the popular franchise hits theaters this weekend, and this iteration is the first not to star Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Fortunately, former Thor: Ragnorak co-stars Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson prove themselves worthy successors to that dynamic duo, bringing their own brand of wisecracking buddy-cop chemistry to this standalone sequel.

(Some mild spoilers below.)

The first Men in Black film (1997) was an instant classic and pretty much cemented Will Smith's status as a mega-star. Smith's chemistry with co-star Tommy Lee Jones was a sheer delight, and the original was rounded out by an equally terrific cast. Miraculously, the sequel, Men in Black II (2002), was almost as good, and a Hollywood franchise was born, reuniting Smith and Jones one last time with Men in Black III (admittedly the weakest film of the trilogy) in 2012.

Enlarge / A Comcast van in Sunnyvale, California, in November 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Andrei Stanescu)

Cable-company spending on network equipment is dropping as major providers like Comcast and Charter finish up their nationwide DOCSIS 3.1 rollouts.

Equipment vendors that sell to cable companies such as Arris/CommScope and Casa Systems are reporting drops in cable-related revenue. Light Reading detailed the situation this week:

Total cable access network-related revenues plummeted 38 percent in Q1 2019, to $275 million, versus the year-ago period, driven by a "strong slowdown" on capacity purchases by MSOs and an ongoing delay in deployments of new distributed access architectures, according to new data from Dell'Oro.

Cable access network spending is known to be lumpy, "but not to this extreme," said Jeff Heynen, Dell'Oro's research director, broadband access and home networking. He said he doesn't recall seeing revenues in this segment of the market reach drop to such a low level since 2013.

He said the trend in reduced Q1 spending can be traced partly to Comcast and Charter Communications, which have all but wrapped up their DOCSIS 3.1 network deployments.

Charter's first-quarter earnings announcement on April 30 said that its "decrease in scalable infrastructure spending was primarily driven by the completion of the rollout of DOCSIS 3.1 technology." Charter, the nation's second-largest home Internet provider after Comcast, said its capital expenditures (excluding mobile) will be $7 billion this year, down from $8.9 billion in 2018.

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  Let me tell you, the noise of all these V12s roaring at the same time is a symphony performance few petrolheads could forget. [credit: Ferrari ]

MONTEREY, Calif.—"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me." Those words were written by F. Scott Fitzgerald back in 1926, and they remain true almost a century later. It's certainly true when it comes to cars, where having a telephone number bank balance opens doors to machinery that the rest of us only ever get close to in video games. Recently, I got a chance to take a peek behind that curtain at the historic Laguna Seca racetrack in California.

Once upon a time, the supercar was the top of the tree, and cars like the McLaren F1 and Ferrari Enzo re-wrote the rules on how fast a car could go and how much it would cost. Before too long, that kind of performance trickled down—even a Tesla P100D will beat either of those cars in a race to 100mph, for example—and so we got the hypercar.

Carbon fiber hybrids with around 1,000hp on tap and seven-digit price tags became the new apex predators of the car world, but for some, even these are now too common, too pedestrian. So what do you do if you've got several million dollars burning a hole in your pocket and you want to go fast, really, really fast? For a certain kind of person, the answer is, you call up Ferrari and ask about its Corsa Clienti program.