Month: July 2019

Enlarge / Tesla cars on a delivery truck in 2018. (credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Image)

Tesla beat its own previous record—and Wall Street's expectations—by delivering 95,200 cars in the second quarter of 2019. That's a big jump from the first quarter, when Tesla delivered a disappointing 63,000 vehicles. And it's modestly higher than Tesla's previous record of 90,700 vehicles delivered in the fourth quarter of 2018.

Wall Street reacted positively to the news, sending Tesla's stock price up 6 percent in after-hours trading.

Tesla reported producing a solid 87,048 vehicles in the second quarter—up from 77,100 vehicles produced in the first quarter and up slightly from 86,555 vehicles produced in Q4 2018.

Enlarge / Wind turbines spin as steam rises from the cooling towers of the Jäenschwalde coal-fired power plant in the distance. (credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Most of the world's nations have agreed to limit warming to 2°C, with a stretch goal of keeping things below 1.5°C. Since we have a good sense of how carbon dioxide drives that warming, it's possible to estimate how much more CO₂ we can add to the atmosphere before those goals are exceeded. People have referred to that limit as a "carbon budget." The budget is useful, because it allows us to evaluate different ways of keeping below it. If cars are electrified by 2030, for example, it might give us more time to figure out how to handle air travel.

Now, a group of researchers has compared that carbon budget to the existing sources of emissions from fossil fuels, including power plants, industrial sources, and more. The analysis finds that we already have enough carbon-emitting power plants to push up against the limits of the carbon budget, and the number of plants in the planning stages might cause us to shoot right past it.

Running the numbers

To figure out how we're doing on the carbon budget, the researchers totaled up all the major sources of emissions, including industrial sources, cars and trucks, and power-generation plants. The annual emissions from each of these was then projected forward, accounting for things like the typical lifespan of each, their annual use (miles for cars, capacity factor for power plants, etc.), and the emissions associated with that use. You can view these as emissions we're committed to, as they'll happen unless we retire hardware before its usable lifetime is up.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi grossed over $1.3 billion worldwide, topping the box office in 2017. So writer-director Rian Johnson pretty much had carte blanche for his next project. And he opted for a palate cleanser of sorts: a postmodern take on the classic whodunnit, called Knives Out. Think Clue meets Murder on the Orient Express, both of which the director has cited as influences.

It's not as much of a radical departure for Johnson as it might seem. His debut feature film, Brick (2005), was a crime drama with film noir overtones, largely inspired by the works of Dashiell Hammett and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. (The actor would go on to star in Johnson's third film, 2012's Looper.) For Brick, Johnson had his actors read Hammett and watch classic screwball comedies like His Girl Friday to bring a lighter touch to the traditional noir genre. Now, he seems to have brought something of that same sensibility—mixing dark subject matter with a lighter touch—to Knives Out.

• 

  It always begins with an isolated manor. [credit: YouTube/Lionsgate ]

Knives Out features a premise worthy of the grande dame of murder mysteries herself, Agatha Christie. Various extended family members gather at the family estate to celebrate their patriarch Harlem Thrombey's (Christopher Plummer) 85th birthday. Said patriarch dies unexpectedly later that night. Could it be foul play? Det. Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) certainly thinks so, and he detains the entire family in the mansion until he completes his investigation.

Enlarge / The latest victim of an apparent wave of Ryuk ransomware has managed to fend off paying attackers, but not everyone is getting away unscathed. (credit: Getty Images)

A spokesman for Georgia's Administrative Office of the Courts has confirmed that the AOC's information technology team discovered ransomware on the organization's servers on Saturday. While the spokesman could not provide specific details about the ransomware involved in the attack, its characteristics are consistent with the Ryuk ransomware that has struck multiple companies and government agencies over the past few months—including at least two Florida cities.

Bruce Shaw, communications and outreach specialist for the AOC, told Ars that a file containing contact information for the ransomware operators was left on the affected servers but that no specific ransom was demanded. "After an assessment of our system, it was determined that it would be best to take our network offline," Shaw said.

The attack's affects were isolated to servers providing the AOC's applications—including case management. "Individual courts' networks are not affected," Shaw said. "Only courts who use applications hosted by our network might experience some delay in their local operations. Our understanding is that all courts are operational, but some processes normally handled by our applications may be impacted."

Enlarge / How the warmest three-day averages from June rank—the darkest red area set new records. (credit: van Oldenborgh et al.)

Much of Europe—and particularly France—has been sweating through an incredible heat wave in recent days, with temperature records falling left and right. Despite it being only June (albeit the hottest June on record in Europe), a station in Gallargues-le-Montueux actually broke France's all-time high by more than 1.5°C, reaching a sweltering 45.9°C (114.6 °F).

A team of climate scientists with an established method of rapidly analyzing extreme weather events like this has already taken a look at this heat wave. (The study has yet to be peer-reviewed but follows a protocol which has.) The team's results give a good idea of the role of climate change in this heat wave.

The first question is how to define this weather event. The scientists decided to go with a human-health-relevant definition of the three-day mean temperature rather than a single daily high. They focused on June temperatures for the whole of France, as well as performing a local-scale analysis for just the city of Toulouse—where much of the team coincidentally happened to be attending a conference on weather extremes at the time.

Enlarge / A Wi-Fi router. (credit: Getty Images | deepblue4you)

Buying your own router instead of renting one from an ISP is one of the few reliable ways to save money on a broadband bill.

But what if you buy and use your own router and the broadband provider still charges you a $10-per-month rental fee? That's the bitter reality for Frontier Communications customers such as Rich Son of Texas.

Son has been a Frontier customer since April 2016 when Frontier purchased Verizon's wireline networks in Texas, California, and Florida. Prior to that, he was a Verizon FiOS customer and purchased Verizon's FiOS Quantum Gateway router for $200 in order to avoid monthly rental fees.